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TJLTRAMONTANISM 



JW. 



THE 



ROMAN CHURCH 



AND 



MODERN SOCIETY. 



E. Q r 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF PROF. E". QUINET, 

OF THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE. 



EDITED BY 



C EDWARDS LESTER. 



NEW YORK: 
GATES & STEDMAN, 114 WILLIAM STREET. 

1845, 



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The Library J 



of 



Congress 



VASHINGTOS 






Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by 

GATES & STEDMAN, 

Jn the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern 
District of New York. 



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PREFACE. 



The Author of this work, M. Quinet, holds the 
Professorship of the Literature of the South of Europe, 
in the College of France. In the progress of his 
course he has been led to examine into the effects 
and condition of the Roman Church at the present 
day, and the present work is merely a publication 
of his Lectures on that subject. The book has 
excited a very extraordinary degree of attention all 
over Europe. And no doubt, though prohibited in 
Italy, as well it might be, it has found its way even 
into that oppressed and down-trodden land, and is 
silently producing its effects there. 

In France, where a strong religious feeling is 
springing up of late years, a feeling which the Jesuits 
have endeavored to avail themselves of for their own 
purposes, this work has exerted a most salutary 
influence. By delineating the Roman Church as it 
actually is, by showing the spirit which actuates it, 
and the hands that direct it, and by the contrast he 
draws between these and the true spirit of Chris- 
tianity, the true Catholicism, M. Quinet has ren- 



VI PREFACE. 

dered a service to the cause of Religion in France 
which cannct be estimated too highly. 

But it is not in France and Italy alone that this 
work is destined to have an influence. The depth 
and comprehensiveness of the Author's views, the 
vast scope of his thought, the extent and minute 
accuracy of his historical researches, and the con- 
summate skill with which he applies the whole 
of history to his subject, render it a work of universal 
interest and importance. 

We see here clearly pointed out the elements of 
the greatness of the Roman Catholic Church in former 
times, and the causes which have led to its present 
state of decadence — the means it has employed in 
all ages to accomplish its designs of universal 
dominion, and the reasons of their failure — the 
agencies it is bringing to bear upon modern society, 
and the course it is necessary to pursue in order to 
baffle its designs. 

We see also in what respects it is the antagonist 
of LIBERTY, though scrupling not to make use of 
that sacred name, whenever it can subserve its pur- 
poses of despotic authority. We see how instead 
of sympathizing in that spirit of progress which is 
the life of modern society, it is ever struggling to 
preserve that state of utter immobility, or rather to 



PREFACE. Vll 



bring about that retrograde movement which leads 
to spiritual death. Have not these things an impor- 
tance and an interest for us on this side of the Atlan- 
tic, as well as for Europeans ? 

Moreover, this is not an affair of the Roman Catho- 
lic Church alone. Every Church, every Sect of 
Christendom may here learn a lesson. A lesson of 
Christian toleration and brotherly kindness — a lesson 
of moderation in the midst of zeal — a lesson of per- 
petual progress. 

The effects of this discussion in Europe are already 
apparent. The Jesuits, that powerful association, 
w T hose malign influence rested like an incubus upon 
the Clergy, and through them upon the people of 
France, have already been compelled to abandon her 
soil. The mode also of their departure is remarka- 
ble, as differing entirely from their usual manner of 
proceeding. They have not waited to be expelled 
by the government, but they have voluntarily retired. 
They have given up the contest in France. They 
have felt that public opinion was too strong for them. 

This result is in a great measure to be attributed 
to the labors of M. Quinet, and of his friend and 
colleague, M. Michelet. The work of which this 
is a translation, and the joint work of both these 
eminent men upon the Jesuits, have, by enlighten- 



Vlll PREFACE* 



ing the public as to their real character, been mainly 
instrumental in relieving France from their presence. 

One word for the Translator. He has endeavored, 
first of all, to be correct. To give, in another lan- 
guage, the precise shade of meaning of any writer, 
is at times no easy task. It has been rendered 
doubly difficult in this instance, by the fact that the 
work was originally printed directly from the notes 
of the author's lectures, without revision, and is full 
of phrases and modes of expression peculiar, so to 
speak, to the lecture-room. The translator has 
thought best to give as literal a translation as was 
consistent with the different idioms of the two lan- 
guages, believing that the nervous and energetic, 
though sometimes rugged style of the original, would 
best harmonize with the frequently sublime eloquence 
of the thought. 

If this book should produce in the minds of its 
readers, any of those pleasurable emotions and ele- 
vated thoughts which it has produced in the mind 
of the translator, — if they derive from it, as he be- 
lieves they will, any new views in regard to the 
position which religion should hold in modern society, 
his object in translating it will have been accom- 
plished. 

New York, Nov. 11, 1845. 



OF THE CATHOLIC KINGDOM PAR EXCELLENCE) SPAIN. 

In order to qualify myself to speak of the South of 
Europe, I have made the tour of Spain. At the point 
we had reached, and under existing circumstances, 
I felt that to pronounce a serious word upon the ge- 
nius of the south, and of the Catholic nations, it was 
indispensable for me to visit that one w T hich, in the 
midst of all its convulsions, has not ceased to per- 
sonify Roman Orthodoxy in its most inflexible rigor. 
I considered this task as part of the duty I had to 
fulfil here. I set out for Spain w T ith the support of 
no one, against the advice and w T ishes of all my 
friends, who, in their solicitude, only presaged ruin 
and disaster for me in that land of misery. 

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Two reasons led me to Spain. The first was 
altogether literary. The books of a modern nation 
may be for me the object of private study; but I 
make it a point of conscience to say nothing of them 
in public, as long as I have not touched with my 
hands, and seen with my eyes, the places, the monu- 
ments, the things, the men who are the perpetual 
commentary upon them. To speak at my ease of 
the expeditions of the Catholic Kings, I must needs 
have followed their traces across the defiles : I should 
1 



SPANISH CHURCH. 



not know Philip II. if I had not seen the Escurial, 
and in the mosques of Toledo* and Andalusia, I 
learned to understand all there is Mahometan in the 
Christianity of Calderon. 

My second, and perhaps principal reason was, the 
necessity I felt myself under, of studying the situa- 
tion of the Spanish Church. In the combat we are 
engaged in with the men of the past, I wished to 
confront that famous Spanish and Portuguese fanati- 
cism, to see it near, to interrogate it, to seek for it 
under its ashes. Does it threaten to rise again 1 
Has the noise of the theological disputes which are 
going on here awakened it? Does it accept the 
alliance ? Is it preparing to enchain the mind of 
the South of Europe ? This is what it was indis- 
pensable that I should know. 

I will say once for all, that the conviction at which 
I have arrived on this point is, that the mass of the 
Spanish Clergy does not comprehend anything of the 
complicated tactics of the Clergy of the North. So 
many subtle discussions, so many ecclesiastical books 
and pamphlets, startle simple men who do not read, 
and who almost consider everything new as heresy. 
Under the semi-philosophical costume that the 
Church Militant with us assumes, they do not recog- 
nize their old church ; and they have an instinctive 
distrust of so many new weapons that they do not 
know how to manage. 

* The Church of Maria la Blanca. 



GENIUS OF THE PAST. 



The crucifix and the sabre are still the natural 
arms of the crowd of these Christians, issuing from 
Mahomet ; everything beside seems to them a snare 
and a danger for the faith. So, until this day, they 
have remained perfectly deaf to the appeals of theo- 
logians and priests from abroad. Whether it be the 
instinct of tradition, or national obstinacy, the Ca- 
tholic kingdom has no faith in this movement of 
reaction, which seems too much embarrassed with 
abstractions and reasonings. The new colors bor- 
rowed from the art of the laity disconcert these peo- 
ple, accustomed as they have been to the Inquisition. 
In a word, the Spanish Clergy, up to the present 
time, far from accepting an intimate alliance with the 
French Clergy, is very near suspecting it of innova- 
tions, of philosophy, of eclecticism-, pantheism, doc- 
trinaire-ism ^ if these words have passed the Pyre- 
nees. 

What has Spain been for two centuries and a half? 
A country reserved to serve as a theatre for the most 
decisive experience imaginable, of the efficacy of 
ultramontane doctrines abandoned to themselves. 
Every particular project of reaction vanishes before 
this reaction of a race of men. 

In the face of renewed Europe, of Protestantism, 
of Philosophy, the genius of the past rallies in the 
sixteenth century, and takes root in Spain ; a bull 
at bay in the circus, it makes head to the crowd. 
The people and the king understand each other. 
For tw r o hundred years, this country swears that not 



PHILIP II. 



a new idea, not a new sentiment shall pass its fron- 
tiers ; and the oath is kept. In order that the doc- 
trines of ultramontanism and of the Council of Trent 
may show what they can do alone for the salvation 
of modern nations, this country is given up — aban- 
doned to them without reserve ; the very angels of 
Mahomet will watch upon the tops of the Arabian 
towers of Toledo and the Alhambra, that no ray of 
the New Word may penetrate into the enclosure. 
Stakes are prepared ; every man who will call upon 
the future shall there be reduced to ashes. Seville 
alone boasts of having, in twenty years, burned 
sixteen thousand men. It is not yet enough ! this 
country, so shut out from the world, must be occu- 
pied by a great king, Philip II., an imperturbable 
soul, in whom is personified the genius of the reac- 
tion. The pencils of Titian and Rubens have not 
even been able to light up with a single ray of sun- 
shine, this pale and sinister figure, this royal spectre, 
the inflexible monarch of a dead society 

This king, the better to escape the murmur of the 
new life, with a word founds his capital at Madrid in 
a desert ; he leads, he drags as much as he can, his 
people into a Thebaid. For himself, he escapes 
still from these remains of noise ; at the foot of the 
rocks of the Escurial, he collects around him four 
hundred monks of the order of St. Jerome, occupied 
night and day with separating him from the land of 
the living. He causes his cell to be built in the 
choir of the church, at the foot of the chief altar, 



COLLISION WITH NAPOLEON. 



in a vault where the light of day scarcely comes, 
mingled with the light of the tapers. It is in this 
sepulchre that he dwells ! Out of this damp and 
gloomy sepulchre comes that spirit of reaction, that 
soul of ice, as it were a venom distilled by the royal 
serpent, which, infiltrating itself into the very ex- 
tremities of Spain, suddenly forbids the great Cas- 
tillian heart, till now so passionate, and warm with 
Arabian fire, to beat. 

This seal placed upon the soul of Spain, has proved 
so powerful, that it has passed through the two last 
centuries unchanged. How, then, has it been 
broken ? By whom ? By what man ? By what 
people? It is, in my opinion, the most extraordi- 
nary feature of contemporary history. 

The French spirit at length encounters this spirit 
of reaction, face to face, in Spain, in those terrible 
campaigns of Napoleon, from 1809 to 1813 ; the 
nineteenth century comes in collision with the fif- 
teenth ; Napoleon wrestles with the phantom of 
Philip II. The holy militia issues from the monas- 
teries, cross in one hand — carbine in the other ; 
it finds again in the mosques the warlike so-ul of 
Mahomet. The democracy and the church seal 
more than ever their mystic union, in the blood of 
Saragossa, Oceana, Vittoria, Talavera, — we bave all 
of us some of our own ones in those dried-up fields. 
The monks are the victors ; they have killed the 
soldiers of France. The reaction set on foot by 
Philip II. has received its crown. The church of 



THE PEOPLE TO ITS CHURCH. 



Spain, victorious, has only to enjoy its uncontested 
empire. This would seem to be the natural conse- 
quence of things ; but quite the contrary happens. 
The Church of Spain, all drunk with joy after the 
fall of Napoleon, perishes in the triumph of Spain. 

In fact, in the midst of the universal exaltation, 
the people addresses itself by a hundred thousand 
voices to its church, and says to her : " Church of 
Spain, I have defended thee at Burgos, at Oceana, 
at Somosierra ; I have given thee the victory at Bay- 
len and Vittoria ; I have saved thee, I have avenged 
thee ; I have filled thy chalice to the brim with the 
blood of France ; w T ith this blood I make to thee a 
funeral libation. While other nations have chosen 
other guides, I have remained faithful to thee ; I 
have wished, I have sought but for thee, that I might 
enter into the new life. Now that thy enemies are 
dead, pronounce for me a word, a single word of life. 
Conduct me toward the future of which others talk, 
but w T hich thou alone dost possess. I am naked in 
spirit as well as in body ; clothe me with thy splen- 
dor. Church of the Saint Dominies, of the Saint 
Theresas, of the Saint Johns of Alcantara, spe-ak one 
of those words of fire which bring forth miracles, and 
which the saints of old knew how to speak to our 
fathers." 

But at these novel words, which sprang from the 
heart of the people, the church of Spain was asto- 
nished, confounded ; she knew not what to reply ; 
she did not even understand this language. How 



WHY THE CHURCH FELL. 



could she make a single effort to satisfy a spiritual 
and social want; of which she had never suspected 
the existence. She shut upon herself her gates of 
brass : she vanished within the monasteries, whence 
there issued not a prayer, not a sigh for this nation 
famishing with hope. At this moment the Spanish 
people understood that the church and itself had a 
distinct life ; it put its hope away from her ; it sought 
elsewhere the present and the future. 

If you wish for a more precise reason of this mira- 
culous fall of the Church of Spain, I will declare it 
in all its nakedness. So long as the war lasted, the 
clergy responded to the spirit of the country and the 
time. In the battle, these men knew how to pro- 
nounce the words of hatred and extermination ; they 
felt all that was holy in the combat, and for this I 
honor them. They were the men of the Old Testa- 
ment, of the ancient alliance, the priests of the God 
of battles, of Allah, and of Jehovah, united for a 
moment under the same banner; they have, as in 
the Old Testament, crushed the head of their enemy 
against the wall ; it is their greatness to have dyed 
with our blood their purple robes. But when the 
battle was over, their lips, accustomed to the hymn 
of hatred, could not find the worlds of peace, of 
reconciliation, of alliance. They had made the 
crucifix an arm of guerillas ; in the Christ cursing, 
they could not find again the shepherd of the world. 

How should they reconcile the living who have 
not known how to reconcile the dead ? They plant. 



8 NO MONKS. 



it is true, a cross upon the road, in the street, at the 
spot where a man has been assassinated ; but they 
have not planted a single one upon those vast battle- 
fields, those immense cemeteries, whose sense they 
do not comprehend, and over which the spirit of 
extermination watches yet. 

It is commonly thought that the clergy fell because 
it did nothing with its hands, and because it left the 
land untilled. Not so. What the noble Spanish 
people expected of these men was not manual labor, 
it w r as the labor of the soul ; and this is what has 
been wanting. They did not ask of the clergy, the 
spiritual w T orkmen, to dig canals, or build up manu- 
factories ; they only asked them to diffuse a new 
moral life, to come out of the old law, to bring forth 
from the rock the stream of the spirit. 

And where are you now, you legions of guerilla 
monks, men formidable in war, powerless in peace ? 
Where are you, heroic monks ? what has become of 
you? I have sought for you everywhere — in your 
monasteries and your cells : about the tomb of Philip 
II., at the Escurial, I have found no one. I have 
knocked at the doors of innumerable religious houses, 
convents of all orders, in the cities in the wastes. 
I have called, and no one has answered. I have 
burst open the door, I have entered ; from Biscay to 
Andalusia, and in Portugal, I have found, thanks to 
you, the cloisters of the Gospel more deserted, more 
ruined than the Alhambra of the Koran. I have 
heard nothing but the hammer of the workman, de- 



LESSON TO BE LEARNED. 9 

molishing, without anger and without regret, their 
walls. I have seen the crucifix battered by the 
storm, in sight of the mosques of the Moorish kings, 
and suspended in the void over the ruins of its 
church. I wished to touch the bones of the great 
captain of the Catholic Kings, Gonsalvo de Cordova; 
these bones have been pillaged in the convent of 
Granada. Near the place where victims were burned 
at the stake, in Madrid, I have listened to the public 
eulogy of Voltaire : everywhere the palaces of the In- 
quisition are turned into theatres ; even those figures 
of the Solitaries, by Zurbaran and Murillo, which 
formerly peopled the cloisters, have disappeared. 

I endeavored at all hazards, to find a monk m 
Spain, and have not succeeded. Only upon remote 
roads, I discovered here and there, men with broken 
voices, w T ho, deprived even of the ecclesiastical dress 
and dying with hunger, asked an alms. It w x as all 
that remained of the soldiery of Philip II. 

Will so plain a lesson at last be understood 1 
Would to God that our clergy could comprehend it ! 
for here it is not I, but facts that speak. The 
Spanish Church wished to stand alone, without any 
one to contradict her ; she has succeeded in making 
a desert round about her. Philosophy, Protestant- 
ism, dissenting minds, science, — she has cursed 
them all ; all have been sacrificed to her. But it 
has happened that in this absolute isolation, these 
men of the past have destroyed themselves. They 
wished to make sterile the modern world ; the steril- 



10 SPAIN RECEIVES THE FRENCH SPIRIT. 

ity has commenced with them. In delivering them- 
selves from their adversaries, they have delivered 
themselves from life ; in attempting to kill the new- 
man, they have struck themselves in the back 

When the Church had thus retired from the con- 
duct of affairs, the Spanish people did not, on that 
account, abandon itself. It had followed in the 
desert, the column of fire as long as it had given 
light; the torch being extinguished in the battle, 
what remained for it to do ? One thing only, and a 
truly heroic thing. It was to embrace instantly, 
without deliberating, the thought, the symbol, the 
future of the hostile nation, of the French people, 
with which it had just mingled its blood. A spec- 
tacle, as it seems to me, without a parallel in the 
World. In 1812, at the very moment when the 
wound of France is bleeding in all the defiles of 
Spain, the thought of France germinates, and takes 
root from one end of Spain to the other. Those 
illustrious guerillas, who did battle so well against 
us, Riego, the Empecinado, Porlier, those new mar- 
tyrs, whom the Church knows not, but whose names 
are inscribed in letters of gold upon the walls of the 
Cortes, take up the spirit, the belief of our fathers 
and brothers wounded and dying under their blows. 

It is asked, whence comes the supernatural breath 
which shakes Spain in all directions? It comes 
from the ashes of every Frenchman who has fallen 
under the banner of the innovating spirit ; wher- 
ever one of our men has fallen, there exhales some- 



TWO SOCIETIES IN SPAIN. 11 

what of the new soul in the bosom of old Spain. The 
thought of our dead, an invisible legion, messenger 
of the future, walks in the sierras and the plains, over 
the whole surface of the country. The dead have 
awakened the living ; they agitate them as with an 
irresistible tempest. The man of the people, the 
soldier feels himself on a sudden seized with the 
spirit of life, without knowing whence it comes ; it 
is the blood of France grown young again, which 
speaks and cries aloud from the Pyrenees to the Isle 
of Leon. 

If I have made myself understood thus far, it is 
evident that there are two societies in presence of 
each other, everywhere in Spain ; you meet there, 
at every step, under all forms, the epoch of the Cid 
and that of Napoleon, the middle ages and the nine- 
teenth century. How to pass from one to the other, 
that is the question which is now agitated. 

The other nations who have been born into the 
new life, in passing from one shore to the other, have 
traversed what is called a philosophical epoch, by 
which is meant the sacred movement of the mind 
and the soul in the modern world. Bacon, Descar- 
tes, Leibnitz, and we must also pronounce the great 
name of Luther, — these men, execrated in their times 
by the men of routine, were the missionaries of their 
nations ; they converted the world to the new life. 
They were what the St. Bonifaces and St. Patricks 
w r ere to other epochs — they opened the way for the 
Word of the future. But Spain has not had a single 



12 SOCIAL TRINITY. 



one of these missionaries. No one sprung from her 
bosom, has taught her the way of that spiritual liberty 
to which she unconsciously aspired. You will not 
find in her literature a single line of philosophy ; it 
is the ideal of what some persons would have at the 
present day — the absolute triumph of official theology 
even in poetry, Spain would not be saved except 
by her two patrons, the Church and Royalty. Both 
have abandoned her. Are you astonished still that 
a people, abandoned or betrayed by her natural 
guides, should tear her own entrails, and find neither 
p^ace nor truce ? Ah ! when the French Revolu- 
tion marched with a sure step, she had at least be- 
fore her eyes the banner of her philosophers. 

Nevertheless, it must not be supposed that Spain 
has nothing to do in the world, or that she can bring 
nothing new into it. Society there has a form which 
is peculiar to itself. Cast better than any other in 
the world of the Catholic dogma, this country was a 
sort of social Trinity composed of the Church, the 
Monarchy, and the Democracy. The two first ele- 
ments failed her at the same time ; the third must 
needs save itself alone ; hence the disorder. And 
perhaps it has not been without design that Spain 
has been by degrees despoiled of her gold to such 
an extent, that she is now the most mendicant, the 
most naked of nations. The insolence of the rich 
and the jealousy of the poor, have nothing to do, 
where poverty is the condition of every one. Social 
"war at least remains unknown. Heroic poverty no- 



SPAIN ABANDONED BY HER CHURCH. 13 

bly endured, which might make the glory of any 
country, if its legislators could comprehend it! 
What, in short, is Spain in rags, compared with all 
the other nations of Europe who take pity on her ? 
We must give her her true name. Spain is a nation 
of proletaries, a monarchy of proletaries, an empire 
of proletaries ! Let her not fear to accept this name ; 
she may yet astonish the world in a new manner. 

However that may be, confess that it is high time 
to have done for ever with declamations against the 
temerity of the reason and the soul, against the im- 
potence of philosophy — what shall I say — against 
the ambition of novelties, that is, against all the in- 
conveniences of the spiritual life created by Christi- 
anity itself. Here is a great nation which, by your 
advice, has renounced all these things ; she has put 
a bandage over her eyes; she h?s followed you 
without turning to the right or to the left, as long- 
as you wished ; and when she aw r akes, the first 
thing she sees in the abyss is her church, chastised 
and crouching, as it were, under the rod of the aveng- 
ing angel ! And this nation turns over and back 
again, in her own blood ; the material life draws 
away from her with the life of the spirit ; earth is 
shut against her as well as heaven ; all nations 
despair of her except perhaps herself. 

I have said that, in the nakedness and abandon- 
ment in which the old spiritual authority left her, 
Spain embraced the spirit of France. Yet, once 
more, this people with eyes closed, turns toward the 



14 ADOPTS THE FRENCH SPIRIT. 

light that warms it ; follows it, groping, without dis- 
cussion. Hence results a: thing which, if I had 
needed it, would have singularly confirmed me in 
my belief; it is that we are not only responsible for 
ourselves, but for the nations that march after us and 
follow in our footsteps. Let France cease to pro- 
gress, and disorder commences among them at 
once ; let France recoil but a single step, and you 
drive back the nations who follow you, into chaos 
and the abyss ; that is to say, we cannot be false to 
ourselves without throwing the world into confusion. 
If the passionate leaven of reaction which accu- 
mulates with us were to pass hence into Spain, do 
you understand, do you imagine, what would hap- 
pen ? With us, w r ords are violent, pointed like 
arrows ; but the mildness of our manners prevents 
their resulting in bloodshed. But imagine a Spanish 
archbishop and four bishops uniting in a moment of 
irritation, to denounce by their names two men, to 
the hatred of a Spanish king and the passions of a 
Spanish province ; and do you think a thing so little 
conformable to the habits of Christian prelates, could 
be without unpleasant consequences ? 

With us, reaction mingled with philosophy, seeks 
to get a new hold of the mind by invisible means. 
In Spain, do you not see, after a political counter- 
revolution, those monks of whom I have just been 
speaking, spring up from their ashes at the cry of 
war, and attempt with their ancient fury, and like 
men who are playing their last stake, the Auto-da-fe 



SILENCE OF THE NORTH. 15 

of the nineteenth century ? Ah ! I do not ask for 
their destruction ; I sympathize with their misery ; I 
have said so to those whom I have met, and I have 
said truly. I do not ask that the shelter of their 
solitude should be denied them, but they must carry 
into it a soul renewed, instructed, enlarged, sancti- 
fied by their sorrows, not a spirit of wrath and ven- 
geance. If the door is re-opened to them, it must 
be to the breath of the future, not to the cold hand 
of the hardened dead who will not be resuscitated. 

While the Spanish clergy, astounded at its own 
fall, has not in itself the strength to move, every- 
where else a movement is made in its behalf. The 
snare is spread in the rest of Europe. See what is 
passing in the North ; those illustrious universities 
of Germany say not a word. Even at Berlin, a 
certain torpor seems to envelope men's minds, and 
becomes for many, a matter of good breeding. At 
Munich, it is considered good taste to think no 
longer, and spiritual death is the court usage. 
Where will this sleep end ? Will the Germans un- 
derstand at last that it is time to forget the rancor of 
1815, and that all is not bad in the tradition of our 
dead at Leipsic 1 If the alliance of the French and 
English mind has thrown great light upon the eight- 
eenth century, I confess I have long thought that 
the alliance of Germany and France could equally 
honor the nineteenth ; I have thought that the 
Catholicism of Napoleon, and the reform of Luther, 



16 ASSOCIATION. 



Descartes and Leibnitz, were worthy to join hands 
from the two sides of the Rhine. 

I have thought that this holy league was the 
strongest barrier against the pretensions of the past, 
from whatever side they came. This opinion, cor- 
rect or not, has made me more than one enemy ; and 
yet it would cost me much to renounce it 

Once more, I appeal to the writers, the thinkers 
of Germany; let them put away from them these 
ferments of hate, henceforth destitute of greatness. 
The Spaniards, w T ho are called so implacable, nourish 
no resentment against us ; their soil, God be thank- 
ed, is sated with our blood ; and has not Germany, 
too, drank enough of it ? In what are the Germans 
outstripped by the Spaniards? What is certain is, 
that hatred is of the past ; alliance is of the future. 

Very near to us, there is a symptom of that so 
desirable association of men, in the combat that the 
genius of darkness is trying to revive. I must hail 
as an important fact what is passing, a few steps 
from this place, in the halls of the College of France. 
In the name of the Sclavonians, the first poet of the 
Sclavonians, our dear, heroic Mickiewitz, fights 
with his holy words for a cause, which is very often 
confounded with our own. Who has ever heard 
more sincere, more religious, more Christian, more 
extraordinary language than that of this exile in the 
midst of a remainder of his people, like the prophet 
under the wallows ? Ah ! if the soul of the martyrs 
and saints of Poland is not in him, I know not where 



SHALL FRANCE RETREAT ? 17 

it is. Above all, who has ever spoken of our coun- 
try, of France, with the bowels of a child, if it is not 
this son of Poland ! Thanks be given to him ! 
These men, these brothers in arms, have always 
been the advanced guard of our armies ; it is right 
that they should choose to be yet, in the movement 
of France, in the advanced guard of the future. 

Every one comprehends, in short, instinctively, 
that in this last game, the question must be decided 
in France. The threads of the re-action end here, 
because people know well, that if this country 
gives herself up, the spirit of death w T ould pounce 
upon the West as a certain prey. Do you know 
what they propose to us 1 Simply this : Our fathers 
have made a precipitate retreat from Moscow to 
Leipsic, from Leipsic to Waterloo, from Waterloo to 
Paris ; and the w T ound bleeds yet. It is proposed to 
their sons to follow on, to resume the movement, to 
continue the retreat ; but a retreat a hundred times 
more miserable, since it is a question of losing in one 
day all the moral ground we have won — of aban- 
doning the spiritual, after having lost the material 
frontiers — of enveloping all concessions, all defeats, 
in one last concession, one last defeat, — in a word, 
of fleeing in disorder behind the Rome of Loyola. 

I contend, on the contrary, that the way to raise 
again that great standard, is to elevate men's souls, 
to trample under foot the fear of spectres, to be 
brave in the things of the spirit, as our fathers were 
in the things of war. 



18 TENDENCY OF THIS INSTRUCTION. 

In order to deceive no one, I must mark in one 
word what I mean by this language, that is to say, 
the tendency of this instruction. I see around me 
different forms of worship, which all carry on a furi- 
ous war with each other, and attempt to live in a 
complete sequestration, mutually excommunicating 
and repudiating each other. If their instincts of 
isolation were alone listened to, there teing no bond 
between them, this society would become dissolved. 
Each chooses to have a separate instruction, and I 
do not blame them for it ; each lives in a distinct 
world. What I am attempting here is to speak to 
all, to ascend to the common source of life, to learn, 
to spell, to speak the language of that great city of 
alliance, which in spite of the anger of some men is 
rising and fortifying itself every day ; for it is not 
true, as has been said, that it is built upon indiffer- 
ence, but rather upon a consciousness of the identity 
of the spiritual life in the modern world. And, 
feeble as I am, how comes it that I do not despair of 
continuing this task ? Here is the reason in a word, 
and it is the whole of my secret. 

I feel that in this work I am deeply in accordance 
with the spirit of the laws, the rights, the revolu- 
tions, the institutions of France ; and this sentiment, 
which I may well call religious, urges me forward. 
In giving the same rights, the same name, the same 
place in the city of life, to the different members of 
the religious family, France has shown a more Chris- 
tian spirit than those who continue to curse her; 



IDEA OF ALLIANCE. 19 

she has entered more than any one else into the 
idea of the Universal Church ; she has found herself, 
so to speak, more Catholic than Rome. She has 
given up a new world to the work of the spirit ; and 
in planting myself on this idea of alliance, which, 
laid down for ever in our country and our institu- 
tions, in form like the profession of faith, I believe 
that I, too, am obeying the will of God, manifested 
and impressed by so many shocks upon the conscience 
of a people. 

The re-action, full of hate, though attempted 
everywhere, can succeed nowhere, because, being 
deadly to France, it is deadly to Europe, and fatal 
to the progress of the truly religious life. 



II. 

POLITICAL RESULTS OF CATHOLICISM IN SPAIN. 

Double Education of Spain by Christianity and Ultra-montanism. 



Little as we may reflect upon the religious 
situation of the people of the West and South of 
Europe in particular, it is impossible not to remark 
the wholly new attitude of the Catholic clergy in 
these countries. In the Middle Ages, when the 
Church thought she had cause of complaint against 
a kingdom, the idea did not occur to her of separating 
herself from it for ever ; she threatened, she chas- 
tised it, in order to repossess it. The interdict 
weighed at once upon the kingdom, and all the 
individuals composing it; the more absolute the 
menace the more visible was the hope of a recon- 
ciliation. It struck every part, that it might re-con- 
quer the whole. Now that this hope declines, they 
arrive at thoughts that would have broken the hearts 
of the Saints of the Middle Ages. They seem to 
renounce the State itself. All intimacy with it 
becomes an insupportable yoke ; every day they 



THREAT OF SEPARATION. 21 

must try to break one of those relations which they 
had joyfully accepted when they had the hope of 
recovering everything. In attaching itself to indi- 
viduals, it thinks to make a mere shadow of the 
body politic ; and if we would not be the most short- 
sighted of men, we must suppose the possibility of 
an order of things where the Church and the State 
are entirely separated, and accept in advance the 
defiance they throw us, to live so. 

In what consists the threat 1 Behold it in all its 
gravity. The Church is ready to say to us as she 
has already said to Spain ; I have bonds of connec- 
tion with persons, with individuals, but I have no 
longer any connection with France. Let her follow 
her destiny as she understands it, let her live or die. 
I have withdrawn from her ; I hold no longer to the 
State, that abstract person, that new form of nation- 
ality which I know not. For ages I have breathed 
life into this great kingdom, I had identified myself 
w r ith it; but I am no longer sole mistress there; 
henceforth I separate myself from it, and fall back 
into my eternity. Let us see how this great body, 
which for fifteen centuries has rested on me, will 
sustain itself without me. 

Here, then, in its simple greatness, is the ques- 
tion which weighs upon us all, and which cannot 
fail to be put one of these days. Catholicism, at- 
tached still to individuals in this kingdom, but sepa- 
rating herself from the eldest daughter of the Church, 
and abandoning her like Hagar in the Desert, that 



22 



THE MODERN HAGAR. 



is a probability, a possibility, that must be foreseen. 
And what follows thence 1 

We who do not detach ourselves so easily from 
that moral person, France ; we w T ho take her for a 
patroness, and cannot desert her without an inex- 
cusable crime ; we, who all of us believe, that there 
is something sacred in a nationality, and that no 
State can live without a divine foundation, in what 
situation do we find ourselves 1 In the necessity of 
seeking whether in the midst of this isolation with 
which they threaten us, there will not remain to us 
some great portion of God ; whether, in the spolia- 
tion they announce, we shall not find a religious 
foundation in justice, in science, in art, in all the 
elements of modern life ; whether this Hagar threat- 
ened with dying of thirst after God, will not see 
some spring leap up at her side ; in a word, whether 
Cathojicism, in withdrawing from modern States, 
takes away from them every religious principle of 
existence and duration. 

You will perceive without my saying more, what 
sort of questions are springing up before us, ques- 
tions a hundred times more to be feared than any we 
have encountered thus far, not without fear (where 
is the serious mind that can touch such things with- 
out apprehension?) but with a firmness derived 
from the consciousness that we are only seeking for 
the truth. Yes, we must have the heart to look 
into these questions. Our times, necessity, the very 
wants of our minds, drive us to it ; and as for me I 



POLITICAL SPIRIT OF SPAIN. 23 

shall but abandon myself to the natural course of 
thoughts which have been the constant occupation 
of my life, and which for the most part I have here 
repressed. For our adversaries are right in part, I 
am free to confess ; instruction, education, these 
things cannot be separated. We must not only 
teach here letters, history, the erudite and material 
traditions of humanity ; we must also nourish and 
arouse the soul, lead back science to that elevated 
source where it is confounded with the principle of 
moral life ; that each of you has a right to exact 
from us. 

In entering upon this course, I have shown you 
religious Spain ; let us now speak of political Spain. 
It has been given me to se-e this great country at 
one of those moments when all the springs are laid 
bare ; in the government a more extraordinary 
drama than all those of Calderon ; incredible discus- 
sions, w x hich after so many unforeseen events, have 
once more disconcerted Europe ; and of which I 
have not lost a syllable. A stranger to all parties, I 
have sought for the truth in all ; perhaps elsewhere 
I may attempt one day to relate in a direct manner 
what I have seen. Despoiling these impressions, 
these facts, of everything of a private nature, and 
elevating them with impartiality to that general form 
which alone is suitable in this chair, I will proceed 
with what I think may be said of the political spirit 
and nature of Spain. 

Catholicism has left upon the Peninsula the im- 



24 ANARCHY AND FACTION. 

press of every moment of its duration ; and as it was 
in the middle age an element of liberty, and since 
the sixteenth century an element of re-action, it has 
imprinted this double character upon the mind of 
Spain. There are two men in every Spaniard, an 
independent, of the epoch of the communes, and a 
subject fashioned by Philip II. From this mixture 
of independence and obedience spring some asto- 
nishing contradictions. The same man who yester- 
day was greedy of respect, is to-day greedy of obe- 
dience, not to say servitude. You think him incon- 
sistent, that he abjures his character. It is not of 
that that we must accuse him ; he carries in him two 
persons, two epochs — the middle age, and the re- 
action of the sixteenth century ; the equilibrium of 
the modern world has not yet been established in 
him. If anarchy is in the individual, it is not to be 
wondered at that it is in the state ; but it must not 
be supposed that it has the same character as in any 
other country. " Anarchy is lovely with us" said 
a member of the Cortes, one of its most decided op- 
ponents, to me at Madrid. In fact, as the re-action 
for two centuries past has reduced this country to 
the most profound misery, anarchy can grow big, 
without deranging a single interest. No workshops, 
no manufactures : men quit the furrow to take up the 
musket; at harvest-time they quit the faction to return 
to the fields. They have pursued the enemy a long 
time ; have fought sometimes ; they return to their 
dwellings ; nothing is changed ; the corn is ripe, 



WHERE ARE THE NOBLES? 25 

subsistence secure; it is the life of the middle age; you 
can understand that such a life may last a long time. 

Moreover, it is not a war of the cottage against 
the castle. There is not a single castle in all Spain. 
I went from Bayonne to Cadiz without finding a 
single remains of a donjon, or feudal manor. As for 
ruins, the people knows of none but those of the 
Moors. The soil of Spain has not preserved a single 
trace of the rule of the nobility ; the land in this 
respect, in all its misery and nakedness, is the 
proudest of Europe. Depopulated in great part, 
without boundaries in the fields, without hedges, 
without walls, without ruins, it bears upon its front 
the immaculate pride of the desert. 

Where are the great of Spain ? Where is the 
illustrious nobility of Spain ? No one could tell me. 
Rallied to the revolution or absorbed, it has disap- 
peared, loyally, simply, without attempting to dis- 
semble its ruin ; it does not even try, as in other 
countries, to survive itself by the privilege of conven- 
tional usages, of good taste, by what one might call 
the conspiracy of good manners ; which is ordinarily 
the last refuge of degenerate nobility. When polite- 
ness is general, when the manners even of the people 
are remarkably distinguished, this last privilege does 
not exist. Besides, in a country which counts eight 
hundred thousand nobles, it matters not to say that 
this or that man is of the number. This politeness, 
this general urbanity of the nation, marks a spirit of 
equality w T hich is the very foundation of their morals. 
2 



26 THE KNIGHTS OF CHRIST. 

This character is so extraordinarily marked in every- 
thing, that to explain it we must go back to what is 
most vital in the past history of Spain. 

How is it that the Spanish people, which seems 
behind all others in so many respects, is more ad- 
vanced in this fundamental point ? The reason is 
this. Representing in the middle ages the idea of 
Christianity against the Moors, no nation has taken 
in this idea more seriously. In the face of the 
Koran, the Spanish nation identified itself with the 
Gospel ; it considered itself, like the Hebrews, the 
chosen people. In the Sierras of Andalusia, wash- 
ing to ask if I spoke Spanish, they asked me if J 
spoke Christian, u habla Christiano V* During 
the strife of eight centuries against Islamism, every 
man became accustomed to regard himself as a knight 
of Christ. My guide, addressing a goatherd at the 
top of a rock, called him chevalier, " caballero!" 
And the echo of a Moorish tower replied that the 
nobility of this man dated from the duel betw T een 
Christ and Mahomet. When God himself is in the 
case, what becomes of differences of fortune and 
social condition? All men are brothers on the field 
of battle ; but if the field is the whole country, if the 
battle lasts eight centuries, if the cause is that of 
Christ, around whom the generations perform the 
vigil of arms, it is evident that the sentiment of 
equality under the banner of the Eternal, that of 
communion through blood, must impress itself in an 
indestructible manner upon the heart of this people, 



ABSOLUTISM AND EQUALITY. 27 

and become the very foundation of its nature. All 
the gold of Mexico has not been able to change it. 

This sentiment of religious fraternity is the purest 
result of the education of Spain, that to which she 
ought to hold the most firmly, which she must not 
sacrifice on any pretext to any form of government. 
It is the trace of the finger of God in her history. 

Here we arrive at one of the greatest difficulties in 
the establishment of a representative government in 
Spain. The mass of the people has not yet ardently 
pronounced in favor of such a scheme ; it has even 
shown a repugnance for it at first. Why ? If it was 
attached so strongly to the idea of the power of one 
only, it was not from love of despotism. No. It 
is, that with absolute power of one, it sees all others 
ranged on the same level, and consequently the 
ancient equality preserved. On one side the people, 
on the other the absolute king, netto; the Castilian 
pride is pleased with this relation without interme- 
diate rank. In choosing deputies, senators, repre- 
sentatives, does not one run the risk of imposing on 
oneself superiors, masters, little kings without a 
crown? This is an idea that secretly troubles the 
country people in the Peninsula. A representative 
government will only establish itself solidly on the 
other side of the Pyrenees, by fully re-assuring 
this instinct of equality, which is the product of ages, 
the fruit of Christianity, the seal of Spain ; and if 
this sentiment is ever to be attainted or overthrown, 
if in its place is to spring up a spirit of exclusion, 



28 VIOLENCE POPULAR. 

the feudality of wealth, the privilege of whatever 
class, that is to say, the germ of social war, I think 
with the great mass of the Spanish people, that it is 
infinitely better that the representative government 
should never be established there. 

The monarchy is thus engraved upon men's 
minds, as a guaranty of evangelical fraternity ; that 
is to say, it is in Spain eminently popular. The 
people sees itself, contemplates itself, is reflected in 
the king ; in despoiling royalty of its prestige, many 
would think themselves dethroned. This sentiment 
is so strong, that I am persuaded the Spanish mon- 
archy has no danger to fear but in itself. For a 
great number, the queen is a sort of constitutional 
Madonna. Hence its peril, if the monarchy thinks 
it may dare to do everything. 

It is certain that the Inquisition has accustomed 
minds to attach a sort of religious sanction to vio- 
lence. They cut off political discussions by the 
steel, as they did theological discussions ; they shoot 
instead of burning ; it is the consequence of the same 
education ; and it must even be added, that political 
autos-da-fe are with a certain number a sure means 
of acquiring popularity. But take care not to abuse 
these things ; for the truly Christian thought, per- 
verted among you, rouses itself against you. What 
are you doing ? You imitate the monks that you 
have just struck down ; do not stain with too much 
blood that white robe that the world beholds. 

What could not a royal soul accomplish, upon the 



LOYALTY OF THE PEOPLE. 29 

throne of Spain, if it boldly took the initiative in the 
regeneration of this people ? Everything would aid 
it, everything carry it forward ; for there are there 
none of those sinister recollections that are met with 
in other countries. There is no Charles L, no Louis 
XVI., whose memory rises before his successors. 
The Spanish nation has followed her kings in liber- 
ty, in servitude, and even in crime. She has even 
amnestied Ferdinand VII. It is by the whim of this 
last, that she happens to be for the last ten years in 
a state of revolution ; perhaps a solitary example of 
a people making a revolution for the sake of obeying 
two lines of the testament of the prince. What 
would you more ? Jealousies are understood else- 
where ; here they are impious. 

On hearing the dull sounds that issued from the 
chest of that miserable crowd, and from the very 
bowels of Spain, at the mere sight of the horses 
w T hich drew along their young queen, following these 
half-stifled cries, that seemed all to say, " Save me !" 
I asked myself if such accents are not made to re- 
veal in a moment, even to a child, that science of 
doing well, which great kings have only learned 
from their peoples in danger. When, after that, I 
was anxious to know r w T hat they proposed to do with 
so holy a force, resting upon the identity of the peo- 
ple with the monarchy, they answered ' me : "We 
will make of the administration what it has been 
made elsewhere. This is wdiat w T e want. 55 

Doubtless ; but to succeed in this you must do yet 



30 SYMPTOMS OF THE NEW LIFE. 

another thing. To suppose that everything must 
have for its object to give bodily food to this crowd, 
which has been accustomed for centuries to do with- 
out it, is to be little acquainted with its wants. 

This people has always had great occupations, 
great ends, sometimes the defence of Christianity, 
sometimes the administration of the new world. 
Since its occupations have failed, it is dying of 
disgust. You must find in yourselves, a new order 
of thoughts, a new moral world, without which all 
combinations with murder, to establish physical or- 
der, will be useless. It is for this that the people 
casts itself down before you. In its inarticulate ac- 
clamations which attend your steps, it does not 
ask of you merely administrators, prefects, clerks, 
marshals ; it asks for all that is wanting to it, honor, 
truth, equity, loyalty, a remains of the old Spanish 
grandeur, the social life of which it believes you to 
be the source. 

But all that is difficult to recover, say you. I 
admit it ! I have begun by supposing in the ruling 
power a kingly soul. 

To these symptoms of the new life in Spain, must 
be added the aspect of political assemblies ; it is too 
commonly thought that the Castilian nation has been 
buried under its borrowed constitution, and that 
the national character has found no occasion to re- 
appear. In the Cortes, the first thing you remark, 
in following the discussion, is that speech itself is 
an end, rather than a means. Speech has been so 



CHARACTER OF SPANISH ELOQUENCE. 31 

long enchained under the bonds of a siknt govern- 
ment, that it is a felicity to Spanish ears to recover 
it, to try its effect upon the practice of modern 
affairs. Oh ! what would not Italy give, if she had 
the single liberty to glut herself for one day in pub- 
lic, with the energetic forms of her political language 
of the Middle Ages ! 

This explosion of speech, independently of the 
passion it expresses, is a real conquest for these na- 
tions of the South, condemned, as they have been, 
since the time of Philip II. to the silence of the 
cloister. 

When a great question is # agitated, one may say 
that the ordinary temperament of Spanish eloquence 
is a threatening calm, a certain icy coldness, which 
suddenly ends in accents of flame, in a hoarse, Afri- 
can intonation, in words of lava, which flow slowly, 
and envelope the whole assembly. The contrast of 
this coldness and these tropical lightnings, is singu- 
larly beautiful; it is the character of the Spanish 
tragedy and drama. The auditory resembles the 
orator. 

I know not how T it happens that the observation I 
am about to make is not to be found in any book of 
travels ; and yet it is impossible not to be struck 
with it. Whatever may be the vehemence of the 
discussion, the fever of the orator, he is never inter- 
rupted by a single murmur from his colleagues, by 
the least sign either of sympathy or of antipathy. 

I have been present at debates, when the question 



32 ICE AND FIREa 



was not simply one of life and death, but of a contest 
between royalty and a man; fever, fury, menace, 
were around me at the bottom of all hearts. For 
the space of a whole week, one party besieged and 
provoked its adversaries with its cold and keen in- 
vectives. During all this time, this half of the as- 
sembly, these men whose political existence they 
were tearing away, uttered not a single syllable. It 
was a silence of marble. Those whose coolness was 
ready to leave them, contented themselves with 
noiselessly retiring. You would have thought them 
resigned or indifferent : it was, on the contrary, the 
extreme of passion. This impassibility lasted till 
the moment, when the greatest orator of Spain, ris- 
ing in their name, and collecting and gathering up 
all those passions, all those smothered cries, cast for 
two whole days into that assembly, words that burn 
yet in my remembrance. 

O accents of the old Castilian loyalty ! Chival- 
ric passion of honor and truth ! Breath of Africa in 
a Christian soul ! Disorder, majesty, harmony, all 
united ! I have heard elsewhere orators ; I found 
there a man, a heart that tears itself and cries aloud. 
This man is at present (March, 1843) concealed in 
some defile of Spain. Excuse me if I could not re- 
sist the opportunity to devote these words to him ; 
his name it is not permitted to me to uronounce.* 

* I may mention it here. It is Don Maria Joachim 
Lopez. 



MODE OF VOTING. 33 

This Spanish character, which imprints itself thus 
upon the parliamentary eloquence, displays itself 
not less energetically in the manner of voting. 
Everywhere else, the secresy of the vote has been 
considered a guaranty for liberty of opinion. The 
Spanish pride could not descend to this arrangement ; 
on the contrary, the most solemn publicity is there 
given to the opinion of each one. Even on these 
occasions, when menace and fury is in the air, every 
one at the moment of voting rises and pronounces 
his vote in a loud voice — yes, or no. The first time 
I saw this, the spectacle filled me with sympathy 
and respect. Truly there was something grand in 
it, something that recalled to mind the pride of the 
old Cortes of the middle ages. What is good about 
it, no one seemed to have the least idea that the 
sincerity of the vote could be altered by fear. They 
do not understand that there can be any danger in 
it for the future, nor that it can be otherwise than it is. 

These external indications are important, as 
showing how seriously these men take the appren- 
ticeship of modern life. Besides, too many passions 
keep possession of them within, for them to care 
much for what is thought of them without. 

The sadness of some among them is evident. So 
many efforts, so many deadly combats, so much 
bloodshed, and for what result ? Many are disgusted 
with liberty, law, justice, and, as usual, in despair 
fall back upon the old servitude ; but I warn them 
that they cannot sleep long upon that pillow. Ab- 



34 CONTEMPT OF POLITICS. 

solute power tempts and deceives in turn everybody 
in Spain ; it is an old heritage that every one covets, 
and that exists no longer. Liberty seems there at 
once too weak to establish for itself a Constitution 
— too strong to accept the peace of despotism. 

This people is deceived when it thinks, that to 
recover the old equality under a common servitude 
would suffice it ; that was the fraternity of death, 
and it is a living fraternity that it must show to the 
world, if it does anything. The Spaniards are too 
much accustomed to think they are laboring and suf- 
fering for themselves alone ; since they have broken 
with their past, they seem to consider themselves as 
isolated from the universal life. This spirit of iso- 
lation takes away half their force. They are gene- 
rally thought too proud, but I find them often too 
humble. I would kindle again in this people the 
thought that the issue of their debates is intimately 
bound up with the destiny of others ; and that they 
have, like all others, their mission in the actual 
world. 

At bottom, the indifference of the masses to politi- 
cal questions springs from an admirable source. 
This people, after having been so long occupied with 
the affairs of God, the wars of God, with difficulty 
becomes interested in anything but God. 

With the peasant of Biscay or the Asturias, this 
contempt of human politics, compared with the 
secrets of sacred politics, is of a character almost 
sublime. It is from the elevated position of the 



THE CAUSE OF GOD. 35 

victorious Christ, that he looks down in pity upon 
constitutional quarrels. Would you then lead the 
masses in the movement of the times, you must 
make them feel that the God of the Evangel is pre- 
sent in the questions of the nineteenth century, and 
that Spain has a place in the divine plan and policy 
of modern times. The way of salvation for this peo- 
ple is to reconcile it with itself. 

Upon what ideas, in fact, does the intelligent part 
of Spain live ? Upon those which have been deve- 
loped by everybody in France, the last twenty years. 
These ideas, good in themselves, but which want a 
certain religious savor, have been promptly de- 
voured on the other side of the Pyrenees ; and their 
understandings having shortly reached the end of their 
system, and fallen back into the void, agitate them- 
selves with convulsive passions. 

What must then be done ? What the whole age 
directs us. Infuse again the sentiment of the great, 
the divine, into political science. For I affirm that 
it is before God alone that Spain will stop on its 
path of blood. 

It must be shown that the cause of the nineteenth 
century, the movement that carries it away, the re- 
newal of law, is the old cause of God ; that there is 
yet, that there is always in the w T orld, a Mahome- 
tanism to combat — that it is not that of the Koran, 
but the principle of inert fatalism, wherever it is 
found — that the religious breath is passing into the 
forms of the new society— that if Europe, in a word, 



36 SPEAK THE WORD. 

if Spain in particular, is drawn towards the future, 
it is because God wills it. These points established, 
one might perhaps fall from lassitude ; but it will no 
longer be permitted to despair, nor to trust to chance, 
nor to abjure one's self, to go from contradictions to 
contradictions, nor to shoot one another for not 
understanding one another. Yes, it is necessary 
for Spain, looking behind no more, to repeat in 
political science the old word of the Crusaders, God 
wills it ! God wills it ! 

A single word thus pronounced in the name of 
science, of the French philosophy, would have more 
efficacy upon the mind of Spain, than all the con- 
spiracies and all the diplomacy in the world. Let 
those in power speak it. For us, let us labor at 
least, in the same idea. Let them not call us unbe- 
lievers. The unbelievers are they who despair of 
life, who deny progress, and a future, that is to say, 
who do not see the finger of the Christian Provi- 
dence in modern affairs. 



III. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE STATE. 



The Council of Trent. Can the State be atheistical 1 



In 1606, Pope Paul V. places the interdict upon 
the Republic of Venice. What had she done? 
She had claimed for the State the rights that France 
had conquered for the State, that no one at the pre- 
sent day thinks of openly contesting. In spite of 
the excommunication, the Venetian clergy, truljr 
national, remain faithful to the Republic, and con- 
tinue to conduct worship as if nothing had passed. 
The Jesuits alone desert; they pass over to the 
enemy. 

In the seclusion of a convent, Sarpi, a poor monk 
of genius, a physician, a naturalist, and above all a 
great writer, defends the Republic by admirable 
pleadings, against the temporal usurpation of the 
papacy. One evening, returning to the convent, he 
is assailed and struck down by four assassins, who 
afterwards take refuge at the house of the apostolic 
Nuncio. Being healed of his wounds, the monk 
suspends on the wall of his cell, over th.e scull of 
a dead man, the weapon of one of the bravi, which 
had been left in his wound, with this inscription : 



38 



SARPI. 



" Poignard of Rome." His vengeance consisted in 
writing in the seventeenth century with the boldness 
of the eighteenth, the history of the Council of 
Trent. This transcendent monument of rapture and 
of reason, marks the last effort of the democratic 
church in the south. Sarpi did in religion what 
Campanella and Bruno did in philosophy ; like them 
he uttered the last cry of independence in Italy. 

We enter here upon a new order of ideas : we 
must go to the bottom of the gravest question — that 
of the relations of Church and State. We are forci- 
bly led thither by our subject, since the first thing 
we meet at the threshold of the two last centuries 
is the Council of Trent, the history of which, related 
in two opposite ways by the monk and the liberal 
thinker, Sarpi, and by the Jesuit Pallavicini, belongs 
doubly to the genius of the South of Europe, the 
destiny of which, in part, it still governs. This 
Council, the last of all, w^as the response of the 
theology of the South, to the reformation of Luther 
and the people of the North. Considering only the 
interest which attaches to it, the historian has good 
reason to call it the Iliad of modern times. Let us 
content ourselves with examining; it in its relations 
with the constitution of the Church. Our subject is 
still but too large ; from Jesuitism we pass to ultra- 
montanism. 

In a human point of view, that which marks at 
first sight the greatness of the church is, that as long 
as she was in a flourishing condition, her govern- 



IMPORTANCE OF THE COUNCILS. 39 

ment was the ideal towards which all political 
governments unceasingly tended. It is certain that 
until the French revolution, the civil world was 
moulded upon the forms of this spiritual society ; you 
might find the spirit of the revolutions of monarchy 
in following the intestine revolutions of the papacy 
and the councils. 

There is nothing more extraordinary than the 
spectacle of these councils, these assemblies of every 
sort of nation, which perpetually changing their 
place of meeting, and from age to age calling God 
to the bar, gave each time a new impulse to the 
w r orld. Compared with that, what are the delibera- 
tive assemblies of our days ? Votes were counted 
by nations, and the affair of the majority was truly 
the affair of the universe. Had Arius, Origen, Pe- 
lasgius, carried it in these questions of vote, all suc- 
ceeding times would have been changed ; for a deep 
logic chains each one of these constituent assemblies 
of Christendom, to all the others. They do not 
merely continue, they develope one another. All 
together they form an organization which lives and 
moves from epoch to epoch. First at the council of 
Nice, at the beginning of the fourth century, is placed 
for a foundation to sustain all the rest, the idea of 
God ; then, according to the order of time, come the 
deliberations upon Scripture, upon the canonical 
books, upon ceremonies, upon the hierarchy ; and 
this discussion lasts sixteen centuries. 

In this interval, as long as the church is develop- 



40 THE STATE IMITATES THE CHURCH. 

ing itself, it is reflected in the corresponding forms 
of the political world. See and compare. When 
the bishop is named by the acclamation of the peo- 
ple, the king of a new-born society is elected in the 
same manner ; the people raise him up on their 
shields. Afterwards, the bishops form among them- 
selves a sort of feudal republic, the image and type 
of the feudality of the barons ; those of Paris say of 
the pope who is about landing, " If he comes to ex- 
communicate us, we will excommunicate him ;" Si 
excommunicaturus venit^ excommunicatus abibit. Is 
it not, feature for feature, the situation of royalty in 
swaddling clothes, still enveloped by the power of 
the lords 1 Gregory VII. and his successors, resting 
upon the mendicant orders, repress and humble the 
bishops ; they found the spiritual monarchy. Is it 
not in all Christian Europe the signal for the tempo- 
ral monai chies to follow in the same way? Louis le 
Gros, Philip Augustus, are so many shadows w T ho 
walk in imitation of the popes of the preceding cen 
turies. 

The fifteenth century arrives ; the schism of the 
west breaks out ; the papacy has many heads, that 
is to say, the schism is in the state as w T ell as the 
church. Must not the same thing be said of royalty, 
when there are two kings in France, the one French, 
the other English ? The councils of Bale and Con- 
stance revolt ; it is also the moment of explosion in 
the communes of France, the cortes of Spain, the 
parliament of England. The council deposes the 



COUNCIL OF FLORENCE. 41 

pope. The state deposes the emperor and two 
kings. Up to this moment what would you more ? 
Has not the temporal world obeyed the least im- 
pulses of the spiritual world? Obedience on the 
part of the State has preceded the commandment, 
the word of the Church. She has only had to move 
a thread to turn all Christendom whichever way she 
pleased. The resemblance of the religious and the 
political constitution produced in society that har- 
mony which is the true beauty of the middle ages ; 
but how long will this harmony endure ? Follow T yet 
a moment my thought, I beg you ; we come now to 
the Council of Trent. 

What was the spirit of this great assembly ? I 
propose to examine this question briefly. It was, as 
is well known, a spirit of restoration, of re-action, 
of counter-revolution. In face of the triumphant 
reform in the North, the Church, which some years 
sooner had been carried away by the genius of inno- 
vation, concentrates upon the holy see, as upon a 
fortress. 

A century before, the papacy, in the Council of 
Florence, had uttered one of those cries of joy which 
make the world leap. Rejoice, raise the shout of 
gladness, jubilate^ exultate, all ye who bear the 
Christian name, omnes qui ubique nomine censemini 
Christiano. What then was the great news that 
Rome thus announced to the world ? Good news, 
indeed, if it should be confirmed ; it was, that the 
East was united to the West, that the priests of 



42 HOPES DISAPPOINTED. 

Asia, the patriarchs, the Greek bishops, the monks 
of Mount Athos, were coming from the separated 
church, and arriving by all sorts of roads at Florence, to 
be reconciled, in the city of art, to the Roman unity. 
A new alliance of Greece and Italy, not only in the 
festivals of art, but in those of religion. Italy 
clothed herself in all her pomp, and scattered her 
fairest flowers in the way, to welcome her elder 
sister, coming a pilgrim from the ruins and cloisters 
of Athens, and Trebisond, and Constantinople. 

It was thought that the ancient division was about 
to disappear ; toward these schismatics, sprung from 
Pericles, an unexampled urbanity was thought to be 
due. Italy and Greece re-united ! Marvel indeed ! 
But the hope lasted but a moment; the rites of 
Athens would not yield to the rites of Rome ; they 
parted, never to meet again : and this disappointed 
hope excited in the Church of the West a spirit of 
distrust which showed itself clearly in the age that 
followed. 

If you compare the Council of Florence with that 
of Trent, you perceive that in proportion as there 
was hope in the form of reconciliation with the East, 
was there want of hope in the latter, of alliance with 
the North. Italy has soon disabused herself ! She 
abounded in promises for Greece ; she has naught 
but anathemas for Germany. 

Hence, instead of appealing, as in the past, to the 
whole earth, to judge between Luther and Rome, 
the papacy in this last business, only trusts itself 



COUNCIL OF TRENT. 43 

fully to a single people. The Council of Trent has 
not, as former ones had, its roots in all nations ; it 
does not draw to it the representatives of all Chris- 
tendom ; it does not rest, in all security, upon any, 
except that people which the papacy has invested on 
every side. Instead of that innumerable concourse 
of theologians, of doctors, of people (omni plebe ad" 
stante^ that is the formula of the ancient Councils) , 
that they knew how to attract in the preceding 
epochs, how in reality is this illustrious assembly of 
Trent composed? A hundred and eighty-seven 
Italian prelates, thirty-two Spanish, twenty-six 
French, two Germans ; these are the proxies of the 
Christian Universe. The East and the North are 
almost equally wanting there ; and on this account 
the king of France refused it the title of Council. 
Again, the mode of deliberation was changed ; in 
former councils it was the custom to vote by nations ; 
every people that had a language of its own counted 
for one person. In the Council of Trent the vote 
was by individual, by head, which secured for ever 
and on all points the majority to Italy. 

Here are you not struck with what is extraordi- 
nary in this situation of affairs '? The Holy See has 
continually become aggrandized at the expense of 
the political existence of Italy ; by the force of 
things it has prevented her from advancing like 
the other nations of Europe, to that unity which 
alone could save her. It has suspended in this 
country the breath of civil life ; it has prevented 



44 PROMISES TO ITALY. 

the political State from developing itself and endur- 
ing; it has absorbed all the vital forces of Italy; 
despoiled, stripped naked by all the world, each of 
the centres of political organization, the Lombard 
line, Pisa, Florence, Venice, disappears in its turn ; 
the temporal world is effaced ; it vanishes before the 
spiritual. 

When this work is completed, that there may re- 
main no trace anywhere of a movement in civil ex- 
istence ; when in the sixteenth century, Italy, erased 
from the political chart, disappears from the region 
of the time to enter into the way of eternal ruin ; at 
this very moment the papacy says to her ; u Thou 
art dead, but I am about to make thee reign ; thou 
hast been immolated to me, but I am about to give 
thee the triumph over the world ; I have absorbed 
all thy rights, all thy life, all thy future ; nothing in 
thee subsists any longer but myself; thou hast been 
wholly consumed for me, and now in my reign, it is 
thou that art about to reign ; for I will make of the 
entire earth an Italy like to thee, but without thy 
sun and thy beauty. Thy thoughts of death, which 
spring from the midst of thy marshes and deserted 
cities, I will impose upon the world ; and there 
shall be, as in thee, a deep silence ; thou shalt 
recognize thyself, thou shalt see thyself reflected 
everywhere, and every one shall envy thee thy 
crown of death. Everywhere, as in thee, the tem- 
poral shall grow pale before the spiritual ; the grass 
shall grow over the civil world, as over the Gam- 



THE FRENCH LEAVE THE COUNCIL. 45 

pagna of Rome." This is what we call modern 
ultra-montanism. 

Absolute domination of the Italian spirit such as 
the new times have made it, and which was the 
cause why so many protests burst forth in the 
Council, on the part of the French, the Spanish, and 
the Germans. Life resisted this declaration of 
death. The French ambassadors retire from the 
Council, to Venice ; they are approved by their 
government, and afterwards by the Tiers-Etat of 
1614. With the pride of hidalgos, the Spanish 
bishops cry out upon the usurpation. They are 
ready to say to the Pope, as the Cortes said to the 
king, " we who are equal to you ;" but the anathema 
interrupts them ; let them go out ! exeant / replies 
the majority of the Italian prelates. The Jesuit 
Laynez becomes the soul of the Council ; and the 
re-action against the North overruling every other 
thought, the organization of the Church takes a new 
form. 

In the middle ages, Gregory VII., Boniface VIII., 
Innocent III. had assumed for themselves supreme 
power ; it was in themselves, upon their personal 
characters, that they rested their force ; and the 
whole of the fifteenth century showed, by the revolts 
of the councils, that this condition had not become 
the law of the Church. The spirit of the Council 
of Trent was to give its full and entire sanction to 
the idea that certain Popes of the middle ages had 
established, of their primacy over the oecumenic as- 



46 THE CHURCH TAKES A NEW FORM. 

semblies. Thus what had been the effect of indi- 
vidual genius, became the very constitution of the 
Church. To paralyze the aristocracy of the bishops 
by the democracy of the mendicant orders, and the 
mendicant orders by the praetorian institution of 
Jesuitism, this was in part the secret of this policy. 
The skill consisted in making the change with- 
out speaking of it in any quarter ; the Church, which 
before was, of right, a monarchy limited by assem- 
blies convoked from the whole earth, became an 
absolute monarchy. From this moment, the eccle- 
siastical world is silent ! the collection of councils is 
at an end ; no more discussions, no more solemn 
deliberations. Everything is regulated by letters, 
bulls, ordinances. The papacy is the sum of all 
Christendom. The book of life stops ; for three 
centuries there is not added to it a single page. 

What concerns us is to see how this new form of 
the Church is almost immediately reproduced in 
the political institutions of the South. Once more, 
but it is for the last time, the State regulates itself 
upon the model of the Church. Philip II. is the 
first to apply in all its vigor, to the temporal, this 
new phase of the spiritual world. It is impossible 
ever to understand anything of his genius, if we do 
not keep before our eyes the ideal of absolute power 
that the Church had just shown to the world. In 
his long career, Philip II. does nothing but apply to 
the conduct of affairs the spirit of the Council of 
Trent. He becomes the temporal Pope, from whom 



THE STATE FOLLOWS HER. 47 

all authority emanates, to whom everything is traced 
up. No more Cortes, no more parliaments, no more 
anything that recalls the movement and the life of 
speech in the middle age. Without moving a step, 
in his cellar of the Escurial, he directs in silence 
that vast empire of the Spains and the Indies, as the 
Pope, from the depths of the Vatican, rules the 
spiritual empire. 

The Council was full of threats; the State is 
filled with stakes and scaffolds. The last word that 
the prelates pronounce at separating is " anathema !" 
echo repeats " anathema," during two centuries of 
political inquisition. The whole of Catholic Europe, 
Austria, Piedmont, the Duchy of Tuscany, Naples, 
France herself, are regulated, in their constitutions, 
upon this sacred model. The Pope said : I am the 
Church; the King of France replies : I am the State. 
Society is governed by ordinances ; Catholicity by 
bulls. The ancient accordance of the tw T o powers 
is thus preserved to the end.» Whether it con- 
fesses the fact or denies it, the temporal power 
conforms itself once more to the spiritual power ; 
the unity of society is preserved, thanks to a com- 
mon servitude. 

It was this that led Pius IV. to declare, that the 
papacy, since the sixteenth century, could not main- 
tain itself but by uniting with princes in an indis- 
soluble manner. 

Who has come to disturb this beautiful order? 
what has destroyed this wise unit ? The French 



48 FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Revolution ; that it is which has overthrown the 
public law, founded, in principle, in the Catholic 
States, upon the Council of Trent : whence you 
may measure the meaning and value of this revolu- 
tion. 

For the first time since Catholicism exists-, the 
temporal world changes, without being provoked 
thereto by a corresponding movement of the Church. 

From the Council of Trent, till 1789, the form of 
law in Catholic Europe remained immutable. The 
State, during two centuries, waits for the Church to 
take the first step ; but the Church remains petrified, 
like the wife of Lot. Then France, performing at 
once a religious and a secular work, plunges all 
alone, at her own risks and perils, into that future, 
where she has no guide but herself. She realizes gov- 
ernments of free discussion, while the ideal which 
continues to hover about Rome, attaches itself more 
and more to absolute monarchy. 

What is to be s^id but that France is not the 
assembly of the twelve old men of the Apocalypse, 
but a being full of life, who in this inspired move- 
ment towards the future, leaves far behind her 
accustomed guide, the Church 1 The ideal which 
would not develope itself, has been outstripped by 
the reality ; this is the meaning of all that you see 
that is abnormal and monstrous in the actual rela- 
tions of the Church and State. All the relations 
are reversed ; to-day it is the lay world that draws 
after it the spiritual WT>rld ; and the questions which 



IS THE STATE ATHEISTICAL? 49 

pre-occupy you are, at bottom, more important than 
at first they seem : since it is necessary, in fact, in 
order to restore harmony in the law, either that the 
Church should lead back the State to her principle 
of absolute power, or that the State should carry 
away the Church in this movement of liberty which 
is the soul of the modern world. 

But when the question is thus put by the nature 
of things, and they wish to escape from it, they pro- 
nounce a word, a formidable word, which has the 
magical power of paralyzing men's hearts. The 
modern State is atheistical ; the law is atheistical ; 
France, as France, is atheistical ! At these words, 
the proudest necks bend ; many accept in silence 
this condemnation, and the adversaries imagine they 
have branded for ever the spirit of revolutions, and 
of modern institutions. Here is, in fact, the whole 
question. 

Ah ! when I know of no atheistical institutions in 
the world but those of the wandering Bohemians, 
who are without a hearth, without a country under 
heaven, is it indeed true that that is the whole spirit 
of our own ? That would be in truth a policy with- 
out hope, a law without law, a day without a mor- 
row. They think thus to strike the future with civil 
death. But let us talk calmly of this. 

When, in old France, violence was the custom of 

the law — when privileges, social inequalities, the 

servitudes of the soil and of men — when everything, 

in short, that Christ reproves, made the very fonnda- 

3 



50 CHRIST A REALITY. 

tion of civil life, you would call that a Christian 
kingdom ! When force reigned in place of the soul, 
when the sword decided everything, when the In- 
quisition, the St. Bartholomew, the torture borrowed 
from the pagan law, the caprice of a single man — 
that is to say — w T hen pagan society still lasted and 
governed, you would call that a most Christian king- 
dom. And since, on the contrary, that fraternity 
and equality inscribed upon the law, tend more and 
more to descend into facts ; since the spirit is acknow- 
ledged as stronger than the sword and the execu- 
tioner ; since slavery and villainage have ceased, 
or that men are striving to abolish the remains of 
them ; since individual liberty has become conse- 
crated as the right of every immortal soul ; since 
they whose fathers massacred each other, henceforth 
join hands — that is to say — since the Christian idea, 
doubtless too feebly yet, penetrates little by little, all 
institutions, and becomes as it were the substance 
and aliment of modern law, you call that an atheisti- 
cal kingdom ! 

What do you understand, in short, by religion ? 
And what is, then, your Christ ? Is he a word or a 
living reality ? If he is but a word, you may, in- 
deed, at your pleasure, nail him to a determinate 
epoch of the past, like the name of the King of the 
Jews, at the top of the cross. If a reality, he must 
be found in what is, and not merely in what is no 
more. 

You seek the Christ in the sepulchre of the past; 



MISSION OF FRANCE. 51 

but the Christ has quitted his sepulchre ; he has 
moved on, he has changed his place ; he lives, he 
has become incarnate, he descends into the modern 
world. Ah ! you who think with a word to cast 
the interdict upon France ! Your great misfortune I 
know, and I will tell it to you : you seek your God 
where He is no longer ; there, where he is, you 
either do not know or do not choose to see him. 

The Council of Trent proposed to itself as its first 
object, to abolish Protestantism, to extirpate the 
dissenters. By fire and the sword it has succeeded in 
Spain and Italy. Some persons of very enlightened 
spirit think that it is to be regretted, for the sake of 
social unity, that it has not been the same in France. 
They believe that a single religion would have given 
this country more consistence. I am persuaded, on 
the contrary, that it was a favor of Heaven for us to 
have escaped the spirit of exclusion which divided 
the sixteenth century. It was not without the will 
of Heaven that our brethren, the Protestants of 
France, escaped from so many snares, murders, 
exiles, and massacres. The sword could do nothing 
against them, for they were necessary to the work, 
and to the future of all. 

If France had remained wholly Catholic, she 
would have irrevocably taken the form of Spain ; on 
the other hand if she had been wholly Protestant, 
perhaps she might have been contented to be a repe- 
tition of England, which is the other extreme. But 
in embracing at once both these religions, these two 



52 OPINION OF LEIBNITZ. 

forms of Christianity, her spirit has necessarily be- 
come enlarged ; she has been obliged to elevate 
herself to a superior understanding of the law, and 
to aggrandize her Church sufficiently to take in at 
last all humanity. For she was to serve as a medi- 
ator between the North and the South, Rome and 
Geneva, the Latin and the Germanic nations ; and 
as all the traditions of the truly universal church 
flowed into her bosom through Catholicism and Pro- 
testantism, she must necessarily serve as a centre 
for the explosion of the new spirit. 

In taking up this idea, I was happy to find that 
one of the men whom I most venerate, Leibnitz, had 
had before me the same conviction. I must cite 
here his memorable words, which have something 
prophetic in thern ; they are extracted from his cor- 
respondence with Bossuet, on the subject of a re- 
union between the Catholics and Protestants. 

a The obstacle that the Council of Trent affords 
to a re-union, " says this great man, " being maturely 
considered, it would seem perhaps that it is by the 
secret direction of Providence, that the authority 
of the Council of Trent is not yet enough recognized 
in France ; in order that the French nation which 
has held the middle ground between the Protestants 
and the ultra-Romanists, might be in a condition to 
labor some day for the deliverance of the Church, as 
well as for the re-integration of her unity. 5 ' 

A little further on I read : " God willed that the 



HE AVAR NOT DECEIVED. 53 

victory should not be complete, that the genius of 
the French nation should not be wholly suppressed." 

As if it were not yet sufficiently clear, he returns 
upon his presentiments with a new force. " I have 
said, and I say again, it seems that God has not 
willed it otherwise, in order that the kingdom of 
France might preserve her liberty, and be in a state 
the better to contribute to the establishment of eccle- 
siastical unity, by a more suitable and more author- 
ized council." 

What power in this obstinate faith in the mission 
of our country ! The hope that this great man has 
put in France has not been deceived ; whatever may 
be the violence of those who dispute, she will never 
fall into the extremes of sects ; she has taken posi- 
tion at the focus of humanity, and it is there that she 
is impregnable. Indeed, I will suppose for a mo- 
ment, a thing which has often occupied the most re- 
flecting minds, that the threats which reach us at 
intervals from England and the North are realized ; 
that a new race, the Sclavonian race, forced by 
Russia, moves in its turn, and w T ill have its day ; in 
a word, that any conflagration whatever be immi- 
nent, or finally, simply that the peace should not be 
perpetual, do you think that in this new situation of 
affairs, it w r ould suffice us to raise the exclusive ban- 
ner of the Council of Trent and of the invincible 
armada ? 

Do you think at least that by that we should draw 
after us, and into our alliance, the nations of the 



54 FRANCE THE BANNER NATION. 

South? But these have with reason the pretension 
to represent more faithfully than we, the spirit of 
this Council ; they would not follow us except we 
should show them a greater, more universal standard. 
On the other hand, to disarm the North in advance, 
the surest way is to oppose to it its own spirit, ele- 
vated in some sort to a higher power. 

That w^hich made in ancient times the force of the 
Roman State was, that she called home to herself 
all the deities of the ancient universe, w r ho thus be- 
came guarantees of her existence and duration. So, 
if ever the day of danger arrives, if the dawn of the 
last battle rises, it is necessary that in the Christian 
alliance, each people of the South and the North, of 
the Latin or Germanic communication, should see 
and recognize in France her banner, her thought ; 
there must not be in humanity a single right that has 
not here its safeguard — not an immortal thought that 
has not here its refuge — not a conquest of civilisation 
which is not here guarantied ; it must be that in 
violating this country, they violate all others ; let us 
say the word, as the whole pagan universe was in- 
terested in the safety of the Roman State, so must 
the whole Christian universe be interested in the 
'safety of France. 

Men will take up this idea, will falsify and calum- 
niate it. No matter ; my conviction is that the 
truth is there. If I am condemned, Leibnitz will be 
condemned with me. 

All that I have now said may be summed up thus : 



CHARLEMAGNE AND NAPOLEON. 55 

so long as the State was barbarous and half pagan, 
it submitted as a matter of right to the absolute su- 
premacy of the Church ; it is the first epoch of our 
history, personified by the sacerdotal race of the 
Carlovingians. When the State became Christian, 
like the Church, it felt that it had, like her, the 
divine right of existence and duration. Its de- 
pendence upon the spiritual ceased. The strife 
commenced ; this is the epoch, from the time of St. 
Louis till the Renaissance. When the State had 
elevated itself to a more universal idea than Rome, 
it sought in turn to absorb the Church ; this is the 
spirit which separates the ecclesiastical laws of 
Charlemagne from the Concordat of Napoleon. 

This revolution is personified in a certain manner 
in the consecration of these two emperors. Charle- 
magne feels himself drawn by a force which sur- 
mounts his own ; he traverses his empire and goes 
to Rome, to fall on his knees before the spiritual 
power. In the nineteenth century, on the contrary, 
it is the papacy that starts from its seat ; dragged 
along by a superior force, it comes to salute in the 
Cathedral of Paris, that world of the laity, that un- 
known power, that new epoch, that future, which 
another right divine has caused to spring from the 
earth. 

At the bottom, no two things resemble each other 
less than the ultramontanism of the middle ages, and 
the ultramontanism of the modern world. The first 
led to action. It was like a great commandment of 



56 NO MORE COUNCILS. 

progress impressed upon humanity. The respect of 
nations, the wars against the infidels, the crusades, 
what aliments these offered to the spirit of the world ! 
Truly the sacred policy had its heroism. 

But since two centuries and a half, who has heard 
on any grand occasion, issuing from the same places, 
the formal order of a great enterprise ? I have ap- 
proached as near as I could those holy walls ; but in 
an age when the whole world is in expectation, and 
has need of a guide, I have not seen coming out of 
the gates of the Vatican, the messengers of the sa- 
cred policy which should carry in every direction, at 
the present time, the solution and the commandment 
of God. And yet it astonishes some that we do not 
blindly submit, that we seek elsewhere an issue, 
wdien no order, no formal impulse, reaches us from 
that side ! 

They call this wickedness, perversity. No, it is 
the necessity of moving and of being ; it is much 
rather the desire to stir up a life in those who treat 
us as enemies. 

Why, since the last sessions of Trent, that is, for 
nearly three centuries, do we see no more Councils ? 
Why this deathlike silence, when it is notorious to 
all that this great assembly has left (what was never 
observed before) a multitude of questions of dogma 
unanswered ? The prelates at separating thought 
to meet soon again in another assembly ; but their 
farewell has been eternal. And meanwhile are there 



HISTORY A PERPETUAL COUNCIL. 57 

no difficulties in the world 1 Where are the solu- 
tions that are wanted for these difficulties ? 

These difficulties have only increased since they 
thought to solve them, for here is the contradiction 
I meet with. If I consider the Church from her own 
point of view, the Latin, Germanic, Greek, Sclavo- 
nian nations are more separated, more infatuated 
now than ever, each in isolation, since the Church 
herself seems to despair of re-uniting them. If I 
regard, on the contrary, temporal society, the same 
nations hold each other, touch, penetrate each other 
more than ever; they are near to forming among 
themselves, as it were, a grand civil communion. 
If Church means an assembly in the name of one 
common thought, it is apparent that all nations tend 
more and more to enter into one common universal 
Church ; the lay world realizes thus the work which 
the spiritual power seems to renounce. 

Shall we ever see the council expected by Leib- 
nitz, where, all creeds being represented, the nations 
themselves will vote ? When under our eyes, the 
inimical orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, 
unite, after having excommunicated each other for 
centuries, is that a sign that the different religions 
will end in understanding each other, and forming 
anew in the primitive unity 1 Wha is certain is 
that if the Church does not convoke the Council of 
Alliance, the God of history himself convokes it 
every day ; for history is a council perpetually as- 
sembled and truly cecumenic, where every people 
3* 



58 THE MODERN CRUSADERS. 

is called, at its proper time, to discuss, deliberate, 
vote. There no one appears by ambassador; but 
each speaks and pronounces in its own name. It is 
not doctors who discuss, but nations full of life, 
urged on by Providence. No assembly can prevail, 
in the long run, against this assembly of the ages ; 
and it is in vain for them to speak elsewhere but of 
excommunications and anathemas, if it, on the con- 
trary, speaks but of alliances and reconciliation. 

The vital creeds of the human race have indubita- 
bly a foundation of unity, covered indeed by the 
wars of intellect, and the passion of sects, but which 
cannot fail to shine out in the end. Happy the 
people which has had the first consciousness of it, 
in its revolutions and in its laws ! 

Vainly they hope to part us, by a last stratagem, 
dividing what they call the sons of the crusaders 
and the sons of Voltaire ; no one in this country ad- 
mits these puerile distinctions and this primacy of 
race. Our nobility is all of the same date, we are 
all children of the crusaders. Only, other days have 
come ; the crusades of the middle ages are finished ; 
those who resume that road, come only to death. 

That time has passed, for other crusades have 
commenced for the living ; have you not heard tell 
of them? The pilgrim nations have risen with the 
age at the call of the God of the living ; they have 
also sowed the way with their bones. They have 
gone, not to Antioch or Nice, where there was 
nothing more to be done, but where God willed that 



WHO SEEK FOR LIFE. 59 

they should carry their thought, to Areola, to the 
Pyramids, upon the Rhine, upon the Danube, upon 
the Moskowa, even to Waterloo, that Golgotha of 
modern times. Behold the crusaders whose banner 
we follow ; for what we seek in following after them 
is life, is not a tomb. 



IV. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 



Galileo. 



The Church, which originally comprises all the 
elements of social life, depopulates itself by degrees 
after coming out of the Middle Ages. At each epoch 
of modern times, an institution, an element of life, 
detaches itself. First, it is the State which separates 
and becomes laical ; then Art, which becomes Greek 
or Roman ; then individual liberty, w T hich identifies 
itself with Protestantism. Finally, all the schisms 
are summed up in the greatest and most irrecon- 
cileable of all, the schism between science and the 
Church, to which we are now led by the name and 
thought of Galileo. 

Each century I see issue from the sanctuary a 
multitude with a particular banner. But these pro- 
cessions, which themselves open the doors, never 
return within the ecclesiastical pale. We wait for 
them in vain, they appear no more. The sanctuary 
becomes more and more solitary : its words them- 
selves change their meaning ; the Church, which 



BIRTH OF GALILEO. 61 

formerly was understood to comprise all Christian 
humanity, comes at last to signify only the body of 
the clergy. 

At the time we have now reached, the Inquisition 
has stifled every appearance of movement in the 
South. The executioner has torn out the tongue of 
Vanini. Giordano, Bruno, Dominis, have been burnt 
at the stake. To Italy, obliged to renounce all the- 
ories, ideas, systems, what remains ? You answer ; 
experience, facts, whatever there is invincible in 
man's nature, mathematics. Well ; experience, 
mathematics, are about to be interdicted, physics 
reproved, geometry excommunicated, that it may be 
clearly demonstrated, that if Italy stops short, if she 
gives up producing, it is because all the issues are 
closed to her, and life itself condemned in her. 

At the same time, Providence is about to make use 
of a great man to spread for the papacy a most 
extraordinary snare; the Roman infallibility will 
find itself compromised by something more in- 
fallible ; the whole world will see the priest come in 
collision with the thought of God. 

The very day that Michael Angelo dies, Galileo 
comes into the world. He continues that dynasty 
of great men which had commenced in Dante. He 
is to the science of the moderns, what Dante is to 
their poetry. 

The first thing that strikes me about him is, that 
reaching to all the parts of the physical universe, 
under the multitude of his experiences, you dis- 



62 HIS PHILOSOPHY. 

cover the spirit of a vast system, of a great body of 
ideas which are never wholly exposed, but which 
often reveal themselves by a word, and make them- 
selves felt in each one of his works ; he himself 
boasted of having employed more years upon phi- 
losophy than months upon mathematics. What was 
this idea, this hidden soul in his labors % The vio- 
lence done to thought by the Roman Church, the 
example of so many useless burnings at the stake, 
forced him to dissemble the best part of himself; he 
has shown but the external body of his science. I 
would that some one might undertake to seek out in 
the confidences which escaped here and there from 
this great man, in some hidden and brilliant frag- 
ments, what was the secret demon of this Socrates 
of the modern world. 

For think not that chance alone conducts him in 
his discoveries. His fundamental maxim, that one 
cannot teach another person the truth, that one can 
only help him to find it in himself, which is the 
foundation of his method, is in itself a whole philoso- 
phy ; it w T ould suffice to place an abyss between him 
and the purely sensualist schools. If we pursue 
the study w r hich I can only point out here, we should 
find that Galileo belongs to the most liberal schools 
of the Pythagorean antiquity ; there was not in the 
new thinkers, the Cesalpinis, the Sarpis, any bold 
idea that he had not embraced. 

From these heights of philosophy as from the top 
of the tow T er of Pisa, he obtained a command of ex- 



BACON KEPLER. 63 

perience and facts. But the moral world being for- 
bidden to him, he was reduced to aggrandizing the 
physical world. 

Who knows if this necessity of compressing him- 
self in one sense, has not added to his native strength 
in another? Bacon has often been compared to 
Galileo ; I find nothing but differences between the 
two men. The first show r s very ingeniously the way 
that must be taken to arrive at the truth ; but the 
moment he makes a step in order to find it, he goes 
astray. He lays down wonderful theories for dis- 
covering the unknown; but he cannot lay hold of 
it. On the contrary, with Galileo, we have no 
lessons and much reality. With him all is life, 
discovery ; creation. He does not say how we must 
find ; he finds. The difference between the geniuses 
of the two is the same as between a man who makes 
a good art of poetry, and one who makes a good 
poem. 

Galileo treats science as Raphael treats art. He 
acts, he enlarges the universe, he creates, he does 
not theorize. 

In this point of view T Galileo resembles much 
more his friend Kepler ; both pursue the same order 
of truths ; only, science appears in the German Kep- 
ler with all the enthusiasm of the apostle. Before 
resolving a problem, he cries out: "I abandon 
myself to the sacred passion" — Lubet indulgere 
sacra furori. He mingles with his formulas, prayers, 
canticles, psalms. In the geometrician of Prague, 



64 ENTHUSIASM IN MATHEMATICS. 

you recognize something of the fire of John Huss, 
and of Jerome of Prague. He leaps upon the bosom 
of mathematical truth, as though he had been struck 
by the burning rays of revelation. You know the 
words, at once haughty and holy, with which he 
opens his treatise upon the revolutions of celestial 
bodies; "It pleases me to insult mortals by an 

ingenuous confession The die is cast ; 

I write a book which will be read by my contempo- 
raries or by posterity, little matter which ! It may 
wait for a reader a hundred years, if need be, since 
God himself has waited six thousand years for a 
witness of his works. M This is the conviction of a 
true geometrician with the fervor of the believer. 

It is a great error to suppose that enthusiasm is 
incompatible with mathematical truths ; the con- 
trary is much more true. I am persuaded that there 
are problems of calculation, of analysis, in Kepler, 
Galileo, Newton, Euler, which suppose as much 
intuition and inspiration as the finest ode of Pindar. 
Those pure and incorruptible formulas, which were 
before the world was, which rule all time, all space, 
which are, so to speak, an integral part of God, 
those sacred formulas, which will survive the ruin 
of all universes, place the mathematician who merits 
the name, in deep communion with the divine 
thought. In these immutable verities, he tastes the 
unmixed purity of Creation, he prays in its tongue. 
Like him of old, he says to the world: " Keep 
silence, we shall hear the murmur of the gods." 



CALM CONFIDENCE OF GALILEO. 65 

The relation of science and eternal religion, though 
expressed with less of exaltation than in Kepler, 
exists no less in the mind of Galileo. Properly 
speaking, it is Galileo who opens the doors of this 
new world, of this modern society, where everything 
rests upon weight and measure. He enters into this 
region of discoveries with a serenity, an internal 
harmony that no one before him had known ; his 
discoveries themselves do not seem to move him. 
He gives himself up to the leaning towards truth 
with the ingenuousness, the security of Christopher 
Columbus setting out for the New World, which he 
already possesses in himself. You would say that 
in discovering things, worlds, unknown laws, Gali- 
leo did but confirm the idea that he already had of 
them. There is nothing which even betrays the 
least astonishment in him ; he handles the universe 
in all directions as though he were acquainted w T ith 
it beforehand. This assured march is the most 
elevated distinctive trait of his genius. 

Observe, that what must have rendered observa- 
tion impossible or sterile in the Middle Ages, was 
the contempt with which the present was regarded. 
Man cast but a passing look upon this universe of a 
moment, w r hich was passing by like a wave of the 
sea, where there was nothing to fix his affections. 
Galileo, first of all, does the very reverse ; he rivets 
his eyes upon each moment as upon an eternity, 
upon each atom as upon a world, upon each world 
as upon an infinitude. From this point of view 



66 THE PRIEST OF THE UNIVERSE. 

which upsets all the past, he draws the new 
science. 

In the cathedral of Pisa, in the midst of ascetic 
prayers, his glance is arrested by a lamp which has 
been set in motion ; its movement reveals to him the 
law of the isochronism of the pendulum. On hear- 
ing of this, Kepler, from the depths of Germany 
cries out to him, " Be confident, Galileo, and go 
on ;" Confide, Galilcee, et progredere ! Galileo re- 
plies by his labors which he himself calls gigantic, 
the discoveries of the law of the fall of heavy bodies, 
of the science of dynamics, of hydrostatics, of the 
composition of the telescope, of the constitution of 
the milky way, of the rotatory movement of the sun, 
of the generation of comets, of the four satellites of 
Jupiter, of the application of the laws of these 
celestial bodies to the measure of longitude. 

With the munificence of a sovereign he announces, 
he gives to the rulers of the State, to the king of 
Spain, to the republic of Holland, such of his dis- 
coveries as are most capable of being immediately 
put in practice. He performs the office of the 
priest ; he reveals the immutable laws ; he teaches 
the wisdom of God in his works. His friends in 
Venice write that in the triumphant march from reve- 
lation to revelation, he is, as it were, the monarch 
of the universe ; I content myself with saying that 
he is its chief priest. Let us see how this priest- 
hood has been recognized by the Church. 

About the year 1536, a Pole, after long residence 



ADOPTS THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM. 67 

in Italy, returns to his own country : there he com- 
poses in a very rigorous spirit, a work of astronomy, 
in which he supposes that the earth and not the sun, 
moves in space. He dedicates this work to the 
Pope, Paul III. ; he dies before the book is publish- 
ed ; a profound silence rests for some time upon his 
memory. 

The book penetrates into Italy; is laughed at. 
Galileo himself, yet young, though struck and con- 
verted, dares not avow it ; he does not yet feel him- 
self strong enough against ridicule. By degrees, 
however, he grows bolder, in proportion as his con- 
viction becomes more irresistible. It needed a sort 
of heroism to proclaim it ; Galileo becomes at length 
the apostle of the new dogma ; he teaches, he con- 
firms, he publishes it. 

Such a hold do truths take, that almost all the men 
who looked to the future, range themselves almost 
immediately on the side of this doctrine. Sarpi, 
Campanella, Grotius, Gassendi, adopt it, so to 
speak, spontaneously; all the men of the past repel 
it ; the most ardent to cause its rejection are the 
Jesuits. Their orator, thei^ teacher of the law, the 
great Bellarmine, is the first to give the alarm ; 
he causes to be convoked an assembly of the Inqui- 
sition, which, in its first council, forbids to discuss 
or to expose the hypothesis of Copernicus. He had 
given up also as suspicious the discoveries of the 
four satellites, and that instrument of magic, the 



68 DEFENDS IT. 



telescope, which threatened to overthrow the 
heavens. 

What then had passed since Pope Paul III. had 
accepted the dedication of Copernicus ? The Re- 
formation had grown big without, and alarm within 
the Church. Henceforth, every novelty, every dis- 
covery becomes a peril, the least sound in the uni- 
verse a star w T hich rises, a meteor w T hich passes by. 
Life itself is a cause of terror. 

In truth, Galileo gave this system a force which 
was menacing to everything that was growing old ; 
it w r as a revolution upon the earth, as in the 
heavens. 

Constrained by the spirit of truth, "incapable of 
keeping silence, in spite of the Inquisition, Galileo 
composes a series of dialogues, in which the new 
system is on the one side defended with irresistible 
art, and on the other awkwardly attacked by one of 
the interlocutors, Simplicius. They had the malice 
to tell the pope, Urban VIII. , that this Simplicius, 
a very narrow mind in reality, was no other person 
than his Holiness himself. There was no need of 
this artifice to envenom everything ; the things them- 
selves spoke loud enough. 

See, in fact, what a change the exposition of this 
new system w T as bringing about, not only in things, 
but in the minds and thoughts of men. The very 
way in which it was presented was a novelty. It 
was no longer the repulsive language of scholasti- 
cism, which addressed itself only to a small number 



THE CHURCH IS ALARMED. 69 



of privileged intelligences. On the contrary, it was 
science making herself humble in order to be acces- 
sible to all. In the supple, familiar, charming speech 
of Galileo, the very heavens seemed to bow them- 
selves, and show their mysteries transparent. Ima- 
gine the method of Socrates applied to the science 
of the celestial revolutions, the grace of digressions, 
the irony of Plato, with the rigor of the demonstra- 
tions of Archimedes or Euclid. One felt himself 
led on by this dialogue from spheres to spheres 
without fatigue. This popular character in the mys- 
teries of science was a thing unheard of ; here was 
the first subject of fear. 

Secondly, the independence of the discussion, the 
tone of the discourse, the consciousness that the 
human mind was receiving something there infallibly 
from its own native force, recalled at every instant 
the tone and almost the words of Luther. 

When Galileo rejected with so much pride the 
authority of tradition, when he established himself 
alone, relying upon his own strength and conviction, 
in face of all the past, it was impossible not to think 
of the liberty which Protestantism claimed for the 
mind of each individual. It was the same position 
in both cases. There was besides in Galileo, the 
tradition and the sentiment of the republican of Pisa. 
With what disdain he opposes to the arbitrary ordi- 
nances of princes, emperors, monarchs, the immuta- 
ble legislation of nature ! In a country where there 
was no longer a trace of free institutions, he in- 



70 REASONS OF THE ALARM. 

trenches himself in the eternal charter of the crea- 
tion ; from that inaccessible height he looks down 
in disdain upon the caprices of princes. In face of 
the infallibility of Rome rises up the infallibility of 
the canonical laws of the universe. This was a 
second cause of suspicion. 

Finally, there was the very foundation of the sys- 
tem. Although they could not take into account all 
the consequences, they did not fail to foresee them. 
What frightened them at the very beginning, was 
the necessity of amplifying the idea they had formed 
of the proportions of the world.* 

Those narrow, inflexible heavens of the middle 
ages suddenly opened, and discovered a perspective 
of immeasurable extent. All the accustomed images, 
of the heavens rolled out like a tent, of the firmament 
stretched out like a skin, ceased to express and em- 
brace the truth. The reality carried it over poetry ; 
men were accustomed to a universe bound up within 
certain limits ; suddenly the horizon, by the genius 
of one man, increases, falls back, extends itself to 
infinitude. To proportion themselves to it, they 
must enlarge the letter, and they choose rather to 
imprison themselves in it as it is. The arm of God 
stretches out in an unbounded manner, while the 
sight of the Church is shortened. 

The little systems, the Gothic arrangements lose 
themselves in this immensity ; imprisoned in a nar- 

* Fosse necessario ampliare l'orbe stellato smisuratissi- 
mamente. 



NEW IDEAS OF THE HEAVENS. 71 

row conception of things, the men of the past recoil 
before this infinity open on all sides. The Roman 
Church, from the first moment, feels that her soul is 
not vast enough to fill the new universe. 

It is remarkable that w T hat most attached her to 
the old system was the most thoroughly pagan ele- 
ment in her composition. In fact, that which 
wounded more than what I have just mentioned, was 
the necessity of changing the idea of the unalterable 
condition of the heavens. The perfectly idolatrous 
thought that the visible heavens, the abode of the 
gods, are formed of an immutable, unalterable matter, 
made the foundation of pagan physics ; it had pass- 
ed from thence into the science of the church. 

Imagine the stupor, when a man announces that 
this immutability of the heavens is a dream of pagan- 
ism, that in those regions all is subject to changes, 
to transformations like those seen on our globe, that 
those spaces are not governed by laws peculiar to 
themselves, and in some sort conferring privileges ; 
in a word, that new w r orlds are there generated, 
born, increase, decay, and disappear, and that the 
revolutions of life follow each other there in eternal 
succession. 

What an abyss w^as thus opened to the thought ! 
And it w r as impossible that the Bellarmines and the 
Urbans should not be frightened at it. What be- 
came of all the visions that the middle ages had es- 
tablished in the constellations as in an abode of 
eternal felicity 1 One could no longer stop at these 



72 OF THE EARTH. 



worlds, transient as our own ; one must go farther, 
rise higher. But the soul of the church was tired of 
ascending ; it refused to follow science beyond the 
visible horizon. 

Besides (for I address myself to men) , if the hu- 
man eye can follow the generation and birth of 
worlds, what became of the old idea of the creation 
finished in six days? The world that had been 
thought shut for ever, re-opens like a theatrical spec- 
tacle ; it enlarges itself. In other words, creation 
is going on every moment. The miracle is perma- 
nent ; and this idea, which naturally and necessarily 
springs from the former, was of itself calculated to 
overthrow the men whose doctrine was, that on a 
certain day and a certain hour, everything was con- 
summated in the physical as in the moral world. 

These presentiments, more or less obscure, receiv- 
ed a startling clearness from another formally ex- 
pressed consequence, I mean that of the new con- 
dition of the earth in the system of the world ; here 
the thought of the Middle Ages was directly contra- 
dicted. 

All the Catholicism of the Middle Ages had repre- 
sented the earth as a condemned world, formed for 
chastisement and for evil. It was the vale where 
all the tears of worlds flowed ; the impure sink of 
the universe. And here, by an overthrow of the 
accustomed theology, Galileo relieves nature from 
this condemnation. He restores to the earth its 
original dignity; he establishes equality between 



DIVORCE OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE. 73 

the heavens and the earth ; he shows that the latter 
is subject to the same laws, and floats in the same 
splendor as the former ; he puts serenity and life in 
the place of mystical theory ; to use his own words, 
he replaces the earth in the heavens, whence they 
had banished it. 

It was thus truly and necessarily a new form that 
Galileo was imposing upon the dogma. Observe 
the question that is about to spring up in conse- 
quence. On one side is the book of the ecclesiastical 
canons and decrees of the Holy See : on the other 
the book of the universe, and the eternal laws of 
geometry. Which shall yield to the authority of the 
other 1 If they are both made by the same hand, 
which should bend, accommodate itself to the other ? 
Is it the revelation written in the Old and New Tes- 
tament, interpreted by the Councils? or is it the 
permanent revelation, which daily manifests itself in 
the living works of nature 1 Shall the entire uni- 
verse, with its inexorable geometry, recoil before a 
word, perhaps badly written and badly interpreted, 
but adopted by the Holy See 1 Behold the problem 
which now for the first time places itself clearly be- 
fore the world : it is the divorce of the Church and 
Science. 

Till then the Church had only encountered parti- 
cular oppositions, sects, opinions, drawn from an 
order of ideas similar to her own. Behold her 
henceforth bravely coming into conflict with the 
brazen law of the creation. The church which calls 
4 



74 THE JESUITS STRIKE AT GALILEO. 

herself universal, is about to put her interdict upon 
the thought which rules the universe. 

If the argument drawn from the word of Joshua 
summed up the whole question to many minds, I 
have said enough to show that a multitude of con- 
siderations were superadded to it. The most acute, 
the Jesuits, were those who saw farthest in this 
business. Those sworn enemies of every serious 
invention, were to have the honor of inflicting the 
first blows upon Galileo. Himself, in a letter to 
one of his friends, says, in speaking of them : u I 
have learned from good authority that the Jesuits 
have persuaded an extremely influential personage, 
that my book is more abominable and more perni- 
cious for the Church, than the writings of Luther 
and Calvin.* 

Thus did they get up the persecution. Hardly 
has the world pronounced its judgment, when they 
revise the matter ; and they end by attributing to 
themselves the discoveries that they began by pro- 
scribing.! 

* In another letter he adds, " It is not for this opinion 
that they have persecuted and still persecute me : it is on 
account of my misunderstanding with the Jesuits." 25th 
July, 1634. Letter published by M. Libri. Vide Journal 
des Savans. 

t " E non vi e altra differenza, se non che voglion pa- 
rere dessere essi gli inventori." Vide Letter of Micanzio 
to Galileo. " You will perceive that the Jesuits are en- 
deavoring to come into all your observations ; there is no 



HE IS GIVEN UP TO THE INQUISITION. /O 

Moreover, there is no affair in which the papacy- 
has appeared oftener in person than this. Urban 
VIII., with a singular acrimony, mixes himself up 
with all the incidents of it. He declares in every 
strain that the doctrine of the motion of the earth is 
perverse in the highest degree* 

Finally, Galileo is abandoned to the holy univer- 
sal Roman Inquisition. See him, this man loaded 
with glory, this good old man of seventy years, 
questo buon vecchio, on his knees before you, bare- 
footed and stripped to his shirt. You, who are now 
the friends of all liberty, tell us what you have done 
at that moment with the man who then represented 

other difference between yon, but that they wish to ap- 
pear to have been the discoverers." 

* The testimony of the Tuscan ambassador leaves no 
doubt in this respect. " As for the Pope, he cannot be 
more ill-disposed than he is towards our poor Galileo." 
Dispatch of the 5th of September, 1632. "His Holiness en- 
tered upon this subject in a great passion. * * * His 
Holiness replied to me with violence. * * * I said to 
His Holiness that certainly he would not prohibit a book 
already approved, without at least hearing Signer Galileo, 
He replied that that was the least evil that could happen 
to him, and that he had better take care that he was not 
called before the Holy Office (e che si guardasse di non 
essere chiamato al S. Uflzio)." Ibid. " Growing warm, 
His Holiness replied to me that one must not impose a ne- 
cessity upon God." Despatch of March 13, 1633. 

This last objection of the Holy See has been exhumed 
in our own days against one of the patriarchs of contem- 
porary science, M. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 



F6 THE TORTURE. 



all liberty 1 For there is a moment when history 
leaves him, and remains wholly in your hands. 
Have you put him to the torture? You alone know. 
You declare that you have put him -to the u rigorous 
examination ;"* and in the infernal code of the In- 
quisition, which I have just been studying, this 
phrase is everywhere the synonyme of torture. And 
has not this expression, a nevertheless it moves," 
eppur si muove, escaped him in the midst of the pun- 
ishment of the cord, the wooden horse, or the iron 
buskin ? You alone can answer. 

But the greatest torment you could inflict upon 
him was a moral torture ; the prohibition to teach 
anything, to publish anything ; a general prohibition 
against all that he has done, or that he may do ; de 
editis omnibus et edendis; an absolute silence^ com- 
manded for the rest of his life.f Shut up, for ever, 
in a part of the country remote from cities, in his 
gaol of Arcetri,| you forbade him all intercourse 
with men. When, his eyes having been accustomed 
to look at the sun, he becomes blind, as Beethoven 



* " Al Rigoroso esame" in the terms of the judgment 
signed by several cardinals. [In a long note, the author 
has here collated numerous passages from the books of 
the Inquisition, showing that this phrase always means 
torture. — Trans . ] 

f " ' What, 5 said I, to the father inquisitor, ' if he wish- 
ed to publish the Credo or the Pater V " — Letter of Mican- 
zio, Feb. 10, 1635. 

i " Dalla mia Carcere d'Arcetri." — Galileo. 



HIS PAPERS LOST. 77 

becomes deaf, when the world whose bounds he had 
enlarged becomes reduced for him to the narrow 
measure of his own body, and when, in this desolate 
situation, he loses his beloved daughter, the nun 
Maria Celeste, w T ho read to him the penitential 
psalms, which you imposed upon him as a chastise- 
ment for his genius, so many sufferings do not dis- 
arm you ! You send the inquisitor of Florence to 
find out if Galileo is cast down, if Galileo is sad ! 
You fear lest his immortal spirit should rejoice in the 
iuward contemplation of the spheres. 

Even his observations, his astronomical " calcula- 
tions, are carried away and dispersed, as suspected 
of heresy. The most faithful of his friends buries 
his manuscripts under ground ; they will not be dis- 
covered again. On this occasion, the Venetian 
Micanzio utters that fine sentiment ; u JVb, all hell 
could not destroy things like these" Well, then, 
you have been more powerful than hell — you have 
destroyed them. 

In a paroxysm of devotion, his heir burns what 
remains of his last labors ; and you ask if Galileo is 
sad ! Content yourselves, you have succeeded in 
reducing to despair a spirit the most serene, the 
strongest, the calmest, that ever lived. " An im- 
mense sadness and melancholy overwhelms me," he 
answers you; una tristizia e melancolia immensa. 
And after two centuries, the chief of the neo-catholic 
re-actiGn, M. de Maistre, thinks to be quits with all 
the past w T hen, with the laugh of the executioner, 



78 THE PROPHETS OF THE MODERN WORLD. 

he mocks at this long torture, which he calls " the 
kistoriette, the little story of Galileo." Ah ! Sirs, a 
truce with your irony ! Ye new defenders of the 
Church, insult not the martyrs ! 

It may, as a last resource, be answered that these 
cruelties belong to the age which has committed 
them ; they may be discussed, palliated if you please. 
The torture has been among the kindest of them, I 
grant ; so, it is not to that, that I attach the most 
importance. The difficulty goes much farther. 

What are these men of a new order, Galileo, 
Kepler, Newton, to whom it is given to read the 
eternal councils of the God of Worlds ? Let us give 
them here their true name ; they are the prophets 
of the modern world. It must not be supposed that 
the spirit of God has spoken only to the Prophets of 
the old law, and that since Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it 
has spoken to no one. These men of the ancient 
alliance have seen, in advance, the law which 
governs the revolutions of human societies. But, 
by the same title, are not Galileo, Kepler and New- 
ton also seers ? They have read in the immensity, 
the laws which move the society of worlds ; and 
these laws, this sacred geometry, contemporary of 
God, co-eternal with God, where did they perceive 
them if not in God himself? The least of all, Lin- 
naeus, after having recognized the laws of life in 
the infinitely small, exclaimed : " I saw the ever- 
lasting, omniscient, omnipotent God pass by me, 
and I was astounded" — " Deum sempiternum, om- 



THE SCIENCE OF GOD. 



niscium, omnipotent em a tergo transeuntem vidi et 
obstupui." 

Now what the world reproaches the Church with 
in this affair of Galileo, the Church ought to under- 
stand clearly. It is the having, like Linnaeus, seen 
the hand of God pass before her and not recognized 
it; it is to have struck at God's envoy; to have 
been wanting in the presentiment, the inspiration of 
things immutable ; it is to have been unable to relish 
the perfume of the Celestial Courts, and the word 
which sustains the universe ; it is to have ranged 
herself on the side of the senses, when the spirit 
was speaking to her ; it is to have remained in the 
spirit of paganism, when Christian intelligence was 
surmounting the habitual illusions of the senses ; it 
is to have believed the body more than the soul ; it 
is in fine, to have repudiated in science the spirit 
and inspiration of Christianity. 

The Church excuses herself <yn the ground that 
infallibility is only claimed in matters of theology. 
True, but what, according to yourselves, is theology 
but the science of God ! It is sufficient to say that 
they who claim the absolute right of representing 
this idea of God upon the earth are bound to possess 
all that humanity can know and possess of this idea. 
In other words, everything, that under one form 
or another, is indubitably immutable, eternal, co- 
existent with the Creator himself, you are constrained 
to know beforehand. If you are the infallible mas- 



80 ONLY ONE TRUE SCIENCE. 

ters of the science of God, you are obliged to know 
all that is known of God/* that is evident. 

The thought of circumscribing, of despoiling 
theology, of separating it from science, is wholly 
modern ; for, indeed, there is but one science, as 
there is but one true religion, and you cannot depart 
from the one without departing from the other. 

Will you say (in fact it has nearly reached this 
conclusion) , that there is one entire aspect of God 
which does not concern you ? But then what becomes 
of your title to represent him? Will you say that 
the laws, that is to say, the Word which has made 
and which has sustained creation, that that sacred 
geometry which was born in the temples, that the 
immutable Word which ceases not to breathe over 
the abyss, will you say that all this does not con- 
cern you? But do you not see that you abandon to 
the philosopher the attributes of the priest ? Instead 
of ruling all, and comprehending all, can it be that 
the doctrine of God is in your hands only a speciality ? 
As I have lately demonstrated that the temporal 
State is at the present day more universal than the 
spiritual, you yourselves demonstrate that science 
at the present day is more universal than the Church. 

It has been perceived that the truth could not be 
divided into two contradictory parts ; everybody sees 
that it is necessary to put an end to the schism be- 

* Nothing can be more logical, than the Brief by which 
Alexander VII. subjects not only faith, but science, to the 
Holy See 



A CATHOLIC SCIENCE. 81 

tween science and the church. How shall the capi- 
tulation be made? We must have a catholic science, 
and there are two ways of effecting it. 

The first consists in reducing voluntarily or for- 
cibly all facts and all observations to the form of the 
Roman Church; upon which it is apparent that 
words have no meaning, or that this science is ne- 
cessarily false. Shut up originally within the 
Church, and becoming greater, more comprehensive, 
science can no longer be contained therein, if the 
Church herself does not expand. Tell me what can 
a Roman astronomy, a Roman geometry, or mathe- 
matics be. In order to merit this exclusive name, 
it must be separated at the outset, from Protestant, 
Calvinistic, Lutheran geometry, that is, it must lose 
the very thing that makes it a science. Instead of 
governing the whole earth, it here descends to the 
spirit of a sect. 

We also affirm, without difficulty, the unity of 
religion and science, but on condition that each 
should be really as vast as the other, or rather that 
the most universal should carry along the other in 
its truth and its universality. To mutilate, to para- 
lyze the one or the other, in order to render the 
alliance more convenient, is evidently to shun the 
question, not to solve it. 

This reign of unity that the Church still pursues, 
science in its onward march approaches, if it has 
not already attained. You load science with majes- 
tic disdain ; meanwhile she accomplishes what you 
4* 



82 MODERN PHRASES. 

content yourselves with promising. What does she 
do ? She is the same for all people ; she speaks in 
all languages ; she brings together remote climes ; 
she abolishes space. Always in accordance with 
the open book, from East to West, she knows neither 
sects nor heresies. She acts, she imitates the Cre- 
ator ; she is the completion of nature, so to speak. 
While you are discussing, she marches on ; and the 
modern world which you will not follow, settles 
dow T n by degrees upon her laws, as upon eternal 
reason, truly Catholic reason made manifest by 
those very men whom you have condemned. 

In our day, a certain number of phrases are adopt- 
ed, by which it is thought to cut off every difficulty. 
I have shown above, that to brand the modern State, 
they say, the State is atheistical. In order to stamp 
the spirit of science, to freeze in its very beginnings 
the search after truth, they have another w r ord; they 
call this, doubt, scepticism ; and this word let loose, 
they rest convinced that human reason has received 
a mortal blow. Let us see if it is so. 

When a man full of genius, Descartes for exam- 
ple, rich in all sorts of experiences and doctrines, 
consents for a moment to despoil himself of this 
glory, of these intellectual riches ; becomes again 
voluntarily poor in spirit; makes himself small, 
having been great ; places himself in the position of 
one ignorant of what he had thought he knew; in- 
terrogates himself; appeals and listens to the God 



THE PRIEST AND THE SAVANT. 83 

within ; what is that but an act of humility in the 
very midst of science ? Why do you contemn it ? 

They pity, it is true, the eternal agitation of the 
thinker, and boast that for themselves, there is no 
longer any movement. But I beg you to tell me 
what is this eternal fever of the thinker, the wise 
man, but the thirst after truth ] And this thirst can 
never be fully assuaged in the philosopher, any 
more than in the truly religious man, who is never 
fully satiated with his God. 

Men will not see that this avidity, this curiosity, 
that they deplore in the spirit of the philosopher and 
wise man, is precisely what is most holy in him. It 
is through this that true science is nearest confound- 
ing itself with true religion ; the impossibility in one 
as in the other, ever to be sated either with truth 
or sanctity, 

I distrust the satisfaction which makes a parade 
of its possession of the infinite ; that is called fatuity 
in the philosophic order. 

At the top of the ladder, the Priest and the Sa- 
vant are confounded with each other. St. Augus- 
tine, Kepler, Galileo, St. Thomas, would have 
entirely agreed at least in the desire of entering 
perpetually more into communion with the immuta- 
ble. On the contrary, would you see the other ex- 
tremity of this ladder of life? The academician, 
convinced that his work is finished, and that all is 
said, and the priest, convinced that he has tranquilly 
consummated the knowledge of his God, ancf that he 



84 THE HEROISM OF THE UNDERSTANDING. 

has now only to enjoy it, are absolutely on the same 
line. 

But in the search after truth, you run the risk of 
going astray ! Doubtless. In every great, gene- 
rous, religious action, I run some risk. There is a 
heroism of the understanding, as there is a heroism 
of the heart ; and it is this virtue of science that you 
would undertake to suppress ! The man who leaps 
from the shore of the known into the unknown, is 
for a moment in danger. Who denies it ? The 
danger constitutes his greatness. He might stop 
upon the shore of the past ; he could sit down tran- 
quilly in the midst of what he possesses. Instead 
of that, he precipitates himself head-foremost, be- 
cause he feels a force within which draws him to- 
wards the truth. Far from fainting, he falls back 
upon the immutable rock ; he gathers there new 
strength, for God hides himself from the pusillani- 
mous, but r<e veals himself to the brave. 
< Yes, we want a religious, Catholic Science, but 
very different, it seems, from what you desire. For 
instead of stopping short, as you advise, we would 
have a science w T hich aspires perpetually to new 
conquests, since this impulse, this aspiration after 
the true, is nothing else but the prayer of the un- 
derstanding. He who works, prays, has been said ; 
still more, then, he who discovers and creates. 

Science is Christian, not when she condemns her- 
self to the letter of things, but when in the infinitely 
small she discovers as many mysteries, as ftiany 



THE CHURCH CHASTISED. 85 

abysses, as much power, as in the infinitely great. 
Science is pious, when she finds everywhere a per- 
manent miracle, and is thus enveloped on all sides 
by revelation. She is universal, when she brings 
together all worlds, all truths, under one law, into 
one and the same unity, and when placed in the 
centre at the generating point, she governs the cir- 
cumference. Science is Catholic, not when she 
commences by conforming to the Vatican, but when 
she is comformable to that living and immutable or- 
thodoxy proclaimed in the council of all creatures, 
in the church of the worlds, by that sacred geome- 
try, * those sublime mathematics, which bend before 
no authority, because they are written in the thought 
of the Creator himself. 

Let us conclude by one more reflection. It will 
be severe, but it is not I that make it. 

The Church has despised in Galileo the teaching 
of the Spirit ; she has fallen into the snare of the 
senses. Since that time, during two centuries, by 
the Inquisition and by violence, she has often perse- 
cuted the Christian movement of the thought. It 
was necessary that a great chastisement should sud- 
denly come, to warn her that she was wandering 
from the true path. That sacred chastisement 
Providence sent upon her, in unchaining against her 
the French Revolution. Heaven could not speak 

* Geometria ante rerum ortum menti divinae coseterna, 
Deus ipse (quid enim in Deo, quod non sit ipse Deus). 
V. Kepler, Harmonius Mundi, lib. IV., p. 119, 



86 DOES NOT ACCEPT THE LESSON. 

more loudly. Has it been heard and understood ? 
How is it that the Church, which commands us, with 
good reason, to derive instruction from every stroke 
of fortune, repudiates on her part this divine teach- 
ing, when it is herself that is struck? Will she 
deny the chastisement? That is impossible. Will 
she pretend that w^hat is true for others is not true 
for her ? She cannot do that more than the other. 
Has the warning not been given with sufficient 
force ? Must God repeat himself? Still less does 
she think that. 

Why, then, return blindly into the same w T ay, as 
if nothing had passed, and as if the rod of the angel 
had not made itself felt? This is the reason: in 
order for the punishment to be profitable, it must be 
accepted as just. Now it is not so accepted. They 
boast of being martyrs, when they have been chas- 
tised; when Providence intended to give them a 
lesson oi humility, they would take only a lesson of 
pride. 



V. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND HISTORY. 



Vico. 



Galileo having thus revealed the fundamental 
laws of the physical world, it was natural that, in 
the same country, a man should be born who would 
seek to reduce to laws equally immutable, the revo- 
lutions of the moral universe w T hich we call history . 
Vico is, in this sense, the legitimate successor of 
Galileo. 

After Kepler and the mathematician of Pisa had 
found out the formulas of the movements of the 
physical world, the problem that suggested itself 
was to seek out those of the civil world. If an 
eternal order governs the courses of the stars, it 
ought also to be found in the successions of peoples 
and of States. The same God which launches the 
stars in their orbits, casts societies into revolutions ; 
and the Providence that lives in nature, lives also in 
history. This idea had been partially conceived 
since the origin of the Christian society ; but the 
Neapolitan Vico was the first who sought to reduce 



88 vico. 

the sentiment to the rigor of science. The great 
city of God, that St. Augustine had seen with the 
eye of faith, the philosopher of Naples would con- 
struct like a geometrical formula. 

To be just, it must be allowed that the new 
science of Vico is immediately connected with the 
spirit of restoration which had displayed itself for two 
centuries in the whole Southland particularly in Italy. 
In the love of traditions, the powerful sentiment of 
authority, the worship of symbols, in the under- 
standing of legends, and the consecration of the 
past, it is in accordance with the reaction of the 
Roman Church. But at the same time that it allies 
itself with Catholicism it imperceptibly transforms it. 

Vico, who was accused in the North of furnishing 
arms to the Papacy, was misunderstood by all around 
him. How could it be otherwise ? While the gene- 
ral tendency in the South was to shut one's self up 
more and more in the letter, Vico aspired vaguely to 
an immense Catholicism, which would have given a 
hold upon all rites and all epochs ; he offered to the 
papacy the empire of the past, renewed by his 
genius. Neither the Pope nor the Italian clergy at 
all comprehended this vast Church, into which really 
flowed all times and all places. Hardly does the 
ecclesiastical power lend an ear to this man, who, 
in a singular language, offers it the help of an idea, 
with the indirect counsel to remodel itself, to expand 
itself to the measure of all humanity ancient and 
modern. They had reduced the religious revolu- 



HIS THOUGHT. 89 



tions to the proportions of the conceptions of Jesuit- 
ism. How is it to be wondered at that no one in 
the Roman clergy perceived that a great thought 
had just been born, which alone could reconcile the 
world with the Church 1 

There was a moment when two issues offered 
themselves to the Holy See ; on the one hand 
Loyola, powerful, skilful, politic, who proposed to 
the Church to circumscribe itself, to set for itself 
bounds, though it should end by reducing itself to 
the proportions of a sect ; and, on the other hand, 
there was a miserable man, without an echo, with- 
out skill, who had nothing but a thought, a half- 
sketched thought, but one which w T as mistress of 
the future, and which consisted in saying to Catho- 
licism: " Enlarge yourself ! extend your walls and 
your symbols ; make all the ages of the past and 
the future enter in ; give unity, not apparent but 
real, to all those peoples whom the same Providence 
governs. I bring you the science of humanity ; you 
must, to deserve your name, expand yourself like 
it ; be the Pope not only of the Latin Church, but 
of the Universal Church." 

Of these two voices, which both addressed them- 
selves to the Roman Church, you know which pre- 
vailed. It is the height of happiness for Vico, that 
he was not comprehended ; if he had been, there is 
no doubt that he would have alarmed the Church, 
and expiated his crime. <""" 

I reduce the originality of Vico to a single thought^ 



90 ORIGIN OF SOCIETIES. 

which is the creatrix of all the rest ; it is the having 
perceived that civilisation springs from the idea of 
God, as a river from its source. On the day when, 
having read Grotius, and seeking to solve the pro- 
blem of the origin of societies, he discovers that 
community among men has its commencement in 
the thought of God, on that day he discovers his 
science. While the publicists, Grotius, Puffendorf, 
and still later, Rousseau, in their inquiries into the 
origin of social arrangements, make everything de- 
pend, at first, upon the invention of the mechanic 
arts, Vico leaps at a bound to the conception of 
God ; and this thought once known, society is con- 
stituted. From that elevated summit, which he 
alone occupies for a century, he sees, distinctly, 
horizons which escape all others. Every look that 
he casts upon human affairs, seen thus through posi- 
tive beliefs, is for him a revelation. The forms, the 
explanations of the past, appear to him in such a 
manner renewed, that all that he perceives he calls 
his own dicovery. 

The only thing I blame him for, is having too 
soon quitted the summit to descend to arbitrary ex- 
planations. If you would have the whole secret of 
a people's history, you must enter intimately into its 
religion. The God of a people is the very substance 
by which it lives, by which the generations are 
bound together in the same unity ; the art, the law, 
the philosophy of a race of men, are nothing else 
than this divine thought, circulating from vein to 



VICO's MISTAKE. 91 

vein, from generation to generation. What are all 
political and social institutions, but a religion realiz- 
ing itself, and becoming incarnate in the world ? 

The soul of the Hebrew law is Jehovah ; that of 
the Mahometan law, Allah ; and that of the Euro- 
pean law the Christ — that is to say, it is always and 
everywhere the religious idea from which society 
springs, and which developes itself in the spirit and 
history of a state, nation, or race of men. 

If religion is the culminating point of a people, 
Christianity is the most elevated idea of the human 
race ; whence it seems that a man who would take 
in the law of humanity, must necessarily fix himself 
at the height of the Gospel. Why, then, has not 
Vico done it? This legislator of the ideal city 
effaces from his recollection the Christian city. To 
embrace the laws of Providence, he confines himself 
to the study of Pagan Rome. It is in the heart of 
polytheism that he sees the divine wisdom best dis- 
played. Why is this ? 

Why has Vico thus reduced his subject ? Instead 
of a city, why does not it embrace the world 1 And 
this city — why is it pagan Rome, and not the Rome 
of the Popes ? Because the liberty he had need of 
to interpret facts, he would not have found in treat- 
ing of a Christian epoch ; because, whilst he was 
doing a work of religious philosophy, he seemed 
only to be doing a work of erudition ; because in 
the Renaissance it was natural that Rome should 
appear as the classical model of every city, of all 



92 HIS SUPERIORITY TO BOSSUET. 

legislation, and that thence it needed but a step to 
present its history, as the abridged formula of the 
eternal will of Providence towards all the peoples of 
the universe* 

In carrying the idea of Providence into the very 
midst of paganism, he did moreover a thing essen- 
tially new. Religious writers before him had only 
been willing to regard the rites and worships of 
antiquity (and this is still the sentiment of many) 
as an unbridled wandering from the truth, a soulless 
delirium. Vico establishes, on the contrary, that 
the divine wisdom made use of these forms of poly- 
theism to communicate itself — I had nearly said, to 
reveal itself, to the barbarians and gentiles. He 
thus renders Providence, in some respects, the ac- 
complice of paganism ; he shows that under the 
figure of these rejected gods, is hidden the purest of 
ideas, and the very substance of the ancient peoples. 

How much, in this respect, he is superior by divi- 
nation to Bossuet himself! Bossuet acknowledges 
in magnificent terms, the wisdom of the institutions 
of the ancients ; but he does not perceive that the 
best of those laws is contained in the principle of 
those very religions that horrify him. Because he 
has seen them chiefly in their decadence, he cannot 
permit himself to accord the least esteem to these 
pagan revelations, to recognize the least reflection of 
divinity in these creeds, these legends, this church of 
the gentiles ; all the political institutions of the an- 
cients are deemed by him not to have any other sup- 



HIS ORIGINALITY. 93 

port than themselves. On the contrary, Vico, with- 
out any criticism, it is true, establishes a sort of 
pagan Catholicism, the forerunner of modern Catho- 
licism. He presents to the world the unique exam- 
ple of a book in which nearly all the details are 
false, but the idea of which is so essential, that it 
breaks forth and seizes hold of you, as the sole real- 
ity in the midst of all the fictions collected by fantasy 
and chance. 

Have you never made this simple reflection? 
The moderns admire the ancients in their art, their 
law, their institutions ; but this is all derived from 
their religious creeds ; whence it follows, that the 
source could not have been so poisoned at its origin 
as is asserted. 

Vico sees, like Bossuet, that the civil world is 
subject to the government of Providence ; but he 
does not stop, like him, at this general thought ; he 
approaches much nearer to the living reality. To 
say that empires are moved by the divine ideas, is 
still to rest in the abstractions of Plato. Here is the 
precise originality of Vico ; it is that of wdiich he 
has been least conscious. He identifies, unknow- 
ingly, the divine ideas, the warnings of Providence, 
with the positive worships, with the religions which 
thus become like so many partial revelations of the 
eternal wisdom, in the city of space and time. It is 
the highest thought to which Vico rises ; it fills him 
with a sort of religious awe throughout the whole 
extent of the book. What matters it after that, that 



94 FORMULA OF IMMUTABILITY. 

this work is full of oddities and contradictions— 
that in the midst of the intoxication into which his 
discovery throws him, Vico tramples under foot the 
details of which he is ignorant ? He has sown ob- 
scurely an idea which has not ceased to grow ; and 
now it envelopes us with light. 

We are now very far, it would seem, from the 
theories of the Roman papacy. But they are about 
to re-appear suddenly in the mind of Vico ; for he 
establishes the same immobility in history that the 
Holy See establishes in the Church; so that we find 
this audacious spirit, at the highest point of its flight, 
suddenly seized again by the doctrines of modern 
Italy. An order of things immutable, a circle of re- 
volutions everywhere the same, a future which always 
resembles the past, a veritable Ixion's-wheel, that 
moves the human race, without, hope, without mor- 
row ; ages which succeed but to repeat themselves, 
generations which pass only to be formed upon the 
same model ; a city of God, a thousand times more 
disheartening than the city of men. Behold the last 
word of Vico ; his ambition is to leave no mode of 
escape for the human race from his formula of immu- 
tability. 

Italy, such as ultra-montanism has made her, could 
reveal all laws except that of development ; she has 
comprehended everything in man, except life. 

There are, in general, two philosophies of history: 
that one which takes its point of view from the old 
law, and that which derives its inspiration from the 



TWO PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY. 95 

new. In the point of view of the Old Testament, God, 
withdrawn out of the ages in the high heavens, 
presides from afar over the external movements of 
history ; he acts from without ; sometimes he with- 
draws himself entirely, abandoning the nations, and 
there is a sort of interregnum of Providence. He 
blots himself out, he reappears and surprises States 
at their awakening ; he leaps as it w^ere by bounds, 
from centuries to centuries. In this wholly biblical 
march, no one can foresee his designs. 

There is a philosophy of history different from 
this. In the most thoroughly Christian point of 
view, Providence acts in a much more intimate 
manner ; God dwells no longer only in the invisible 
heights ; he acts no more by shocks and surprises., 
He has become incarnate ; he has made himself 
man ; he lives in the heart of nations and of states. 
In this sense, history is an eternal Evangel, filled 
wholly with the God within ; it is he who speaks 
and moves in the vast bosom of the nations; he 
acts from within, outward, uninterruptedly ; he 
dwells in the foundation of things; he fashions the 
internal spirit of empires, and events are only the 
consequences which he abandons to man; every- 
where living, he communicates life to all. It is, in 
human affairs, the spirit of development and pro- 
gress taking the place of the immutable and the 
arbitrary. 

Vico has written universal history in a pagan 



96 ALL HISTORY SACRED, 

spirit, Bcssuet in a biblical spirit. It remains yet 
to be written in the renewed spirit of Christianity, 

From this point of view, the philosophy of reve- 
lation becomes a thing possible. Instead of casting 
the interdict upon the face of almost all the ages, I 
see them all coming forth from God, and approach- 
ing in procession nearer and nearer to light and life. 
Each brings its image, its rite, its thought, to that 
tradition in which they must all be represented. 
To me there is no longer any profane history ; every 
history to me is sacred, because in each I recognize 
the affection of something divine, without which it 
would not exist. Because Christianity has raised 
me up, shall I from this height, regard only with 
contempt, that unknown multitude of my brethren 
who, from worship to worship, tend towards its 
splendor 1 Must Jehovah be no longer anything to 
me because I recognize some rays of his sublimity in 
the God of India and of Persia'? Does the Christ 
disappear from my sight because in the remotest 
times I meet in amazement with barbarian Christs, 
incarnate like him, born of a virgin like him, sacred 
presentiments, by which humanity prepares itself 
for the good news from Judea % Do the Hebrew 
Prophets speak to me the less because I find the 
form of their visions upon the mutilated sculptures 
of Persepolis 1 

On the contrary, the more I discover of these re- 
semblances, the more I perceive everywhere the 
principles of the same faith, the relics of one vast 



THE LIFE OF HUMANITY. 97 

church which must one day recover itself, and re- 
unite what the breath of the times has divided. I 
see building itself up under my eyes, ever since the 
origin of things, this vast divine city, founded not 
merely upon the word of one people, but upon the 
word of all, who, in different degrees, tend toward 
the same faith, and each bear testimony to, a part 
of the truth. 

What is, at bottom, the life of humanity? A 
perpetual movement to come forth from God, and to 
return to him. The oriental civilisation reposes in 
him ; the Greek world comes out of him, the middle 
age re-enters, but with more plenitude and depth ; 
for the great God of history is not merely a word of 
the schools, an abstraction ; he lives, he moves ; and 
in this movement he drags the moral world along 
with him towards unknow T n heavens. 

I ask myself, what in the system of ultra-mon- 
tanism may be the manifest end of history ; as for 
antiquity the end is clear enough ; it is to prepare 
the way for the Hebrew people. Think not that I 
find this end too small ; it enters into the very idea 
of Christianity ; the Hebrew people having had the 
most elevated thought and revelation of the East, it 
is very reasonable to show all the rest of the world, 
converging to that point. But the case is very dif- 
ferent with the system of the Roman Church applied 
to the new times. So far as it satisfies antiquity, so 
far it is counteracted by Providence as to what 
affects the modern world. 
5 



98 HISTORY NOT FINISHED. 

It is perhaps from a secret instinct of these contra- 
dictions, that neither Bossuet, nor any one after him, 
has attempted to continue this system to our days. 
To the question, what is the visible end of modern 
history ? ultra-montanism should reply : it is the 
visible triumph of the papacy. To compose a phi- 
losophy of history which peculiarly belongs to it, it 
is obliged to show, that all facts for three centuries 
tend evidently to the absolute power of the Holy See. 
But who will dare to sustain this position, when the 
great events of the world, the Reformation, the 
French Revolution, all go in an opposite direction ? 
That bold man is not yet found ; Jesuitism, which 
has done so much, has not yet attempted that, and 
ultra-montanism has hitherto recoiled before its own 
idea. It has not dared to carry out its philosophy 
of history to the end. 

Many thinkers, since Vico, have sought to sum 
up all the laws of Providence, in a single one. You 
know the most famous, that of Hegel, the infinite, 
the finite, and their relations. To these thinkers I 
will apply the same reflection. 

All, without exception, speak of human history as 
if it were finished ; they separate time into certain 
divisions which they call the East, Greece, the mid- 
dle age ; without any presentiment of what is to 
follow, they determine the laws of the past and give 
them for the rule of humanity, as if there was to be 
no to-morrow. Why do none of these learned for- 
mulas satisfy you 1 Because you feel in yourself 



THE FUTURE BELONGS TO IT. 99 

one entire part of humanity which contradicts and 
protests against them, one whole world of which 
they take no account, namely, the future. 

You revolt inwardly against rules w T hich, to be 
true, make it necessary that there should be no more 
any life, and that everything should be already fin- 
ished. Humanity is for these thinkers a complete, 
consummated whole : in these formulas, the funeral 
inscription of the human race is published in ad- 
vance, the judgment passed in the valley of Jehosa- 
phat; while, on the contrary, you feel within your- 
selves living forces, youthful energies, which cry 
aloud, and demonstrate to you that this pretended 
whole is only a fraction. 

To-morrow, will come other men, other people, 
other forms, other conditions, a new humanity which 
their minds have reckoned as nothing in their 
calculations. Already their reign threatens to pass 
away ; the circle they thought shut, re-opens ; the 
world stifles in the formulas of the schools. Let us 
not attempt in our time to say to the wave of life : 
" No farther shalt thou go." The law of humanity 
must be composed of the past, the present, and the 
future that we carry in us ; whoever possesses only 
one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law 
of the moral world. The true philosophy of history 
is Janus with two faces, one turned towards the 
past, the other towards the future. Thus our task, 
as w r e understand it, is double; let us study the 



100 EYE OF THE CHURCH CLOUDED. 

spirit which is no more ; let us listen to the spirit 
which is already knocking at the gates. 

At bottom, the science of the laws of Providence 
in history should be the natural province of the 
priesthood. It is often asserted that this science 
had its birth at a modern epoch, that it is of yester- 
day. No, it is as old as the world ; only it remained 
identified with the doctrines of the Church as long 
as the Church was full of life. To show the finger 
of the Eternal in the affairs of the time, to recognize 
the divine in human things, to whom does that be- 
long, if not to the priest'? It is undeniably the 
most essential part of his mission. As long as he 
fulfilled it, no one could conceive the idea of taking 
away from him the confidences of the Eternal, 
which properly belonged to him ; he pointed out 
each day the will of heaven writing itself upon the 
earth : no intelligence could ask for more. 

Unhappily there came a moment, about the end 
of the Middle Ages, when the eye of the Church be- 
came clouded. Events which were out of all her 
expectations, for a time disconcerted her; in the 
midst of revolutions which contradicted and stag- 
gered her, her vision became embarrassed ; she 
let the thread of Providence fall from her hands. 
Instead of embracing the whole horizon of human- 
ity, she only considered as living and reasonable the 
point where she stood. Could she give to men the 
divine meaning of those changes, those revolutions, 
which all seemed to overthrow her? She could 



SHE PARTS WITH HER FUNCTIONS. 101 

only, in her amazement, curse and keep silence. 
What happened then ? There formed itself of neces- 
sity, without the Church, a particular science of 
these arcana of God. It no longer sufficed to curse 
all that transgressed the immutable circle she had 
traced out ; the anathema explained nothing. 

Why, in primitive times, when the Church pos- 
sessed her forces entire, she had understood the 
divine mission, even of the invasions of the Barba- 
rians ; and in the times of her decline, she obstinately 
refused to see the divine necessity of the Reforma- 
tion, of the French Revolution, and of almost all the 
changes which were passing under her eyes. It 
was, therefore, divinely and humanly necessary that 
this thread of Providence, which had been broken 
between her hands, should be picked up and tied 
again by others. Minds, strangers to the clergy, 
then performed the office of the clergy ; they ex- 
plained to the human race the design of God upon 
renewed humanity; and this consciousness of a 
Providence they called the philosophy of history. 
Vico, Condorcet, Herder, Hegel, Emerson, have 
done for modern times what the St. Augustines and 
theSalviens did in the primitive Church; they have 
cleared up the counsels of God which had remained 
impenetrable to the eye of the Roman Church since 
the sixteenth century. 

Once more the priest has allowed the highest of 
his functions to be taken away from him by the 
Laity ; he has kept the sacred vases, while others 



102 THE CHURCH OF HUMANITY. 

have carried away the odor of the Eternal. So true 
is it, that, in the modern world, the consciousness of 
the divine, after having ceased to be the property of 
the Church, has got out of her bounds and in ad- 
vance of her on many occasions ; and if she does 
not take care, the priesthood of the spirit will soon 
constitute itself without her, in spite of the priest- 
hood of the letter. 

Here, in less than a century, has the Roman 
priest suffered himself to be despoiled of two holy 
thoughts, first by Galileo, of the science of the God 
of nature, and secondly by Vico, of the science of 
the God of history. Let him a moment longer thus 
allow himself to be dispossessed of the science of 
the living God, and to-morrow what will be left to 
him? 

If it were complete, the philosophy of universal 
history would be the manifestation of the divine 
action in all human affairs ; it would therefore iden- 
tify itself with universal religion. 

In truth, since its origin, humanity, enveloped by 
Providence, forms but one and the same Church. 
But this Church extends itself, increases from age 
to age ; everything which pretends to make itself 
motionless, necessarily makes a schism with the 
human race. The great orthodoxy enriches itself 
with every new truth ; what had appeared at first 
universal, in endeavoring to stop its progress, 
becomes sectarian. 

Men thought, in modelling themselves on the form 



MAN TENDS TO GOD. 103 

of the Roman empire, to have attained the limits of 
Catholicism. But the world at the present day pre- 
sents a more vast Catholicism, which has no limits 
but humanity itself. 

What are the tumultuous agitations of man in the 
past ? Why has nothing that he has met with been 
able to satisfy him ? Why has he in the long ran 
changed everything he has done, overturned all that 
he has built up ! Because he has felt himself con- 
fined in each of these forms as in a sect, and has in- 
cessantly aspired to come out of the sect, to enter 
the vast orthodoxy which should reunite all. Always 
has he aspired to something greater, more general, 
to a more universal Church ; he has always felt that 
he was capable of a more complete creed, of a 
brighter light. From ruin to ruin, from Church to 
Church, he has not ceased a day to gravitate towards 
God. 

And some persons of the present day hope to stop 
him in this ascension of life ! It would be wiser to 
attempt to stop with the hand the globe launched in 
its orbit. 



VI. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND LAW. 



The Inquisition. 

Our subject abandons us ; the work of Vico is the 
last effort to seize again with lustre the philosophic 
authority in the South of Europe. Vanquished 
thought resigns itself — submits to violence. Italy, 
after having attempted all sorts of liberty, has again 
fallen under the double yoke of the Empire and the 
Church. The two links of the chain are riveted. 
Never was country better invested. Even that calm, 
temperate historian, Giannone, for a word upon the 
ecclesiastical finances, is imprisoned for life. After 
him, we look in vain for a writer who raises his 
voice with power. 

Silence commences in the South ; but in the place 
of those festivals of art and of literature which had 
never been wanting in those countries, we find a 
dumb institution, which expresses the whole thought 
of the ecclesiastical reaction in Southern Europe — 
the Inquisition. Sometimes, in the middle of the 
finest day, all nature is seized with a silence of 
consternation 5 even the insects are silent : a bird of 
prey, in the highest heaven, hangs over the horizon. 



PRINCIPLE OF THE INQUISITION. 105 

I shall not dwell here upon the jurisprudence of 
the Holy Office. I shall not show in its most revolt- 
ing details, that ideal of moral and physical torture ; 
that queen of torments* is too powerful a weapon, of 
which I will not make use. I address myself to the 
spirit : it is the spirit of that legislation that I wish 
to point out in a few w r ords.f 

It was impossible for the Roman Church not to 
carry her principles into her penal code. She doubts 
not in matters of faith, and she doubts not any more 
in criminal matters ; hence, w 7 ith her, the accused 
and the guilty have one and the same name. J 
Whoever appears before her has heaven and earth 
against him : the examination is itself a punishment. 

When the Church accuses, she appears persuaded; 
all her efforts tend to extort an avowal of the crime, 
that, by virtue of her infallibility, she perceives in 
the darkness. From this anticipated conviction of 
crime, spring the multitude of ambushes and snares 
spread for the purpose of entrapping the criminal 
into a confession. The names of the witnesses are 
concealed, r falsely given. In the smallest details 
one perceives throughout this fundamental idea, that 
the truth is all on one side, and the devil on the other. 

* Pagano. De' Saggi Politici : " Regina de 9 Tormenti." 
f My observations are based upon a work I have already 

cited : the Official Code, or Sacred Arsenal of the Roman 

Inquisition, printed at Rome in 1730. 
% 11 Reo. Modo di esaminare il Reo ne' tormenti. SanU 

Uffizio,p.267. 

5* 



106 THE TORTURE 



Hence the incredible mingling of gentleness in 
words with cruelty in actions. Without the least 
scruple, they subjected men by way of examination, 
to the cord, the rack, the fire, thinking to chastise 
them for obstinacy. Decrees of torture against the 
witness who varies in his testimony, the witness 
who vacillates, the witness who is presumed to be 
well informed and who denies it, the witness who 
pretends he has been suborned, etc. Torture of the 
accused upon the fact ; reiterated torture if he is 
obdurate in denying (se egli stara duro nel negar) . 
The fact avowed, torture upon the ulterior truth, up- 
on the belief, the intention, the accomplices, the 
identity; torture in caput proprium.* Children 
could be submitted to torture from the age of nine 
years ; the pagan law waited five years more.f 

It is recommended in the formulas, always to 
speak to the accused with exemplary mildness, while 
burning his feet anointed with lard in a chafing- 
dish, and breaking his arms by the punishment of 
the cord. This has been called hypocrisy ; but no, 
it was the consequence of a principle that was fol- 
lowed in full security of conscience. Never one 
hard, vehement word : the language was evangelic, 
the actions infernal. Nothing was abandoned to the 
sensibility of the judge. 

* Op. Cit, p. 264. 

f Praticadel Santo TJffizio, p. 274. Compare the Roman 
law. De minore quatuordecim annos qucestio habenda non est. 
Digest, lib. xlviil, tit. 18. 



IN THE ROMAN LAW. 107 

The formulas of the interrogatory were drawn up 
beforehand, officially, line by line, including even 
in advance and abridged, the tears, the cries, the 
eventual sobs, or the silence of the tortured ; he has 
only to fill up with his tears and his blood, the sig- 
nature of the torture.* 

It is true that the avowal extorted by violence 
must be confirmed in full liberty of conscience, out 
of the chamber of torments ; but if, on the contrary, 
he denied it, he was carried back to the torture : 
and thus the effect of this legislation was to lead 
from executioner to executioner. 

I will say something more, without putting in it 
more warmth than is necessary to express the simple 
truth. The examination by torture is not peculiar 
to the Church, I know ; she found it in the Roman 
law. But observe this : the Romans had perceived 
that to attempt to find out the secrets of the soul by 
the violence of steel and the fire, was in itself an 
impious thing ;f they had very well understood, ma- 
terialists as they have been made out, that the cord 

* " In the said torture, the feet being naked, anointed 
with hog's lard, and retained in the brasier over a hot fire 
after having kept silence for the space of, &c, &c, he be 
gins to say, in a loud voice, vociferating, ah ! aye ! &c. 
&c." Op. Cit., p. 272. " The executioner pressing strongly, 
the accused begins to cry out, in a loud voice, &c. &c," p, 
274. These words occur at almost every page of the 
sixth part. 

t Etenim res est fragilis et periculosa et quse veritatem 
fallat. Digest, lib. xxviii., tit. 18. 



108 ONLY APPLIED TO SLAVES. 

and the rack could do nothing upon the thought. 
So the idea never occurred to them, to apply this 
mode of interrogatory to ajfree witness, to an eman- 
cipated spirit, who made, according to them, a part 
of living society. 

To whom did they apply the torture ? To wit- 
nesses whom they did not consider as persons, those 
who were not yet elevated to the spiritual life of 
man, who had not yet obtained, according to them, 
the right of citizenship in the human race.* But 
what does the Church do in the sixteenth century ? 
Do you see it ? Instead of entering upon the way 
of spiritualism and equity that the Romans had 
partially perceived ; instead of distinguishing, as 
they at least did, between the accused and the wit- 
nesses, instead of going on to emancipate from physi- 
cal violence those whom the pagan law had left out 
of its protection in this particular, instead of follow- 
ing up the marked progress which had been made 

* Torture is the common law only in regard to slaves. The 
whole spirit of the criminal law of the Romans is to that 
effect. This is clearly expressed in the following rescript : 
"If any one, to escape from torture, pretends that he 
is a freeman, he must not be tortured till a judgment is 
had on his condition." Si quis, ne questio de eo agatur, 
liberum se dicat, Divus Hadrianus rescripsit, non esse 
eum ante torquendum quam liberale judicium experiatur. 
Digest, ubi supra. See this whole title, de Quxstionibus ; 
the slave alone recurs at every line. See also Beccaria, 
On Crimes and Penalties, Ch. 16, and Montesquieu, Esprit 
des Lois, Book vi., ch. 17. 



THE CHURCH APPLIES IT TO ALL. 109 

since antiquity, what does she do ? I would gladly 
not mention it; the words may seem hard, but I 
must not recoil. 

So far from affranchising all men from this servile 
torture, she applies it to everybody, accused, wit- 
nesses, accomplices, serfs, citizens, and nobles. To 
minds developed by eighteen centuries of Chris- 
tianity, she applies violence such as the Pagans 
would not tolerate, but for those whom they regarded 
as chattels. How far then is the Church, at this 
period, from the spirit of Christianity ! She had 
come to emancipate all men from slavery ; and she 
brings all men back under the law of the slave. 
Materialist and anti-Christian law, though it were 
an equality of torture in a w T orld of serfs ! She had 
come to glorify the spirit of man, and now she strikes 
at the body to make the spirit speak ; more material- 
istic than the Roman law, she is, in the Inquisition, 
more universally Pagan than Paganism. 

You understand by this, the meaning of that 
famous page in which the principal writer of the 
neo-Catholic reaction, M. de Maistre, consecrates 
the priesthood of the executioner, which he calls the 
bond of human association. This is not merely the 
intrepid sally of a wit ; it is the real expression of 
the ecclesiastical law in the South during the last 
three centuries : " The ivhole earth, which is but an 
immense altar, continually saturated with blood, the 
scaffold, which is an altar." All these bloody words, 
which I agree to admire, if it is allowed that they 



110 THE EXECUTIONER. 

belong to the worship of the god Siva, rather than 
to the religion of Jesus Christ, these words are not 
a play of the imagination ; they strictly belong to 
the spirit of the legislation of the Holy Office. 

It is certain that the executioner is at the begin- 
ning, the middle and the end of these institutions ; 
he commences the instruction, he continues, he 
finishes it ; he is a personage who does not cease to 
reappear and act. M. de Maistre only shows him 
at the catastrophe. Why refrain? he should be 
shown in the whole course of the judicial action. 
M. de Maistre only represents him in the struggle 
with the body ; it is but half the work ; he should 
have been shown in his furious strife with the spirit, 
of which he must become the confessor and the 
Word. He makes the innocent cry out as the guilty ; 
it is his part to separate, through blood, the white 
and spotless soul of the just from the black soul of 
the criminal. The judges, the priests, are mute; 
he alone speaks ; he makes the flesh, the bones, the 
entrails speak. From this language of the torn en- 
trails, he draws at all risks the auspices of the jus- 
tice of God. It is the Pagan sacrifice of the living 
man upon the altar of Jesus Christ ; this is what we 
must dare to say of it. 

I do not accuse individuals, or corporations ; I 
only show how principles are linked together. This 
code of the Church was the ideal of criminal legisla- 
tion, so long as society remained exclusively Catho- 



CHANGE IN THE FENAL LAW. Ill 

lie and Roman ; it was impossible that it should be 
otherwise. 

One is astonished at the cruelty of the penal laws 
of the Middle Age. But do we not see that as long 
as civil society denied in principle the spirit of ex- 
amination, it was impossible to apply it seriously to 
a particular case of its legislation ? It scarcely 
admitted the possibility that it could err. How then 
could it begin by admitting that the individual might 
be in the right and not itself? In our days, it is the 
fashion to revile the spirit of examination and re- 
search. They say it is a lamentable thing, this 
doubt that has seized upon the world, and they make 
a parade of their grief at it. Let us quit this base- 
ness of heart ; without letting ourselves be softened 
by the ruins, let us look after the living Church. 

It is precisely this spirit of examination and 
Christian doubt, which, passing into the penal law, 
has changed whatever was inflexible and barbarous 
in it. As soon as society, coming out of her pre- 
tended infallibility, felt all that was wanting to her 
in the ideal of justice, she understood that between 
her on one part, and a man, an accused person on the 
other, there was an equality founded upon the dig- 
nity of an immortal spirit. In that duel which is 
called criminal judgment, instead of crushing the 
accused at once, and not allowing him to open his 
mouth but for his own condemnation, she has willed 
to invest him with her own power. She has given 
him, to defend himself, the same guaranties that she 



112 WHO EFFECTED IT. 

has to accuse him. The individual appears as the 
equal of society ; the one and the other discuss ; 
God pronounces no longer by the groans of the tor- 
ture, but by the voice of the human conscience. 
This is the change brought about in the principle of 
the law. 

Now, is it a Council that has brought about this 
moral revolution of the mind against force, this de- 
velopment of the Christian law? Is it the Holy 
See 1 No, it is heretical England, it is Italy, sus- 
pected of heresy in Beccaria and Filangieri, it is 
philosophical France, it is the Revolution, it is the 
whole world out of the Church, which perseveres, in 
name at least, in the pagan law of the Inquisition. 
Whence is confirmed, what I have hitherto pointed 
out, that the laity, who, in advance of the Church, 
carried the living genius of Christianity into science 
and the state, has made it penetrate also into the 
civil law. The Church follows : Electra carries the 
empty urn of the living eternal. 

The first sign of this new institution is, that she 
turns against the spirit which has created it. It is 
not enough that the Church of the South should lose 
the instinct of the true in science and history ; there 
happens now something much more strange ; she 
ends by disowning sanctity itself. How shall we 
express it with sufficient clearness ? Possessed by 
the evil spirit of her own creation, the Inquisition, 
she suspects her own saints. 

In the times when the Church was full of life, 



f&S CHURCH LOSES THE SENSE OF THE DIVINE. 113 

she recognized and saluted from afar the halo around 
those in whom God dwelt. She was never mistaken 
in this respect. See the history of the Apostles, of 
the early fathers. The approach of a man of God 
made them start; at his physiognomy, at his ac- 
cents all exclaimed, it is he, without ever before 
having seen him. And now, prodigious as it 
appears, the Church seems to have lost this same 
tact, which I would call the sense of the divine ; she 
sees under her eyes great actions, sublime charac- 
ters, that she will canonize at some future period ; 
but meanwhile, instead of proclaiming, she con- 
demns them. Everything which comes out from the 
ordinary life, everything which is born of pure hero- 
ism, disconcerts her ; it has a semblance of heresy. 

How is it that the miracles of virtue which the 
sixteenth and the fifteenth century continually 
brought forth, in the first instance only provoked her 
wrath ? It is because these great hearts lived in a 
region superior to that of the official, Italian Church. 
They wanted the calculating, formal virtues of 
Jesuitism ; that is what they comprehend at once, 
wonderfully well ; but virtue without cunning, with- 
out dissimulation, without after-thoughts, those great 
flights of divine love, which rise above the earth, all 
that seems at first alarming. Is it not an innovation ? 

This is why St. Philip de Neri is at first put 
down ; they refuse him the sacraments ; he is almost 
excommunicated for too much purity. Spite of 
his ties of office and of relationship with the Holy 



114 REPUDIATES THE SAINTS- 

See, how many clamors against St. Charles Borro- 
meo 1 St. John de la Croix in vain immolates 
himself daily, in the fervor of the most transcendent 
orthodoxy ; so bright a light dazzles the Church ; 
the papal nuncio causes him to be cast into prison. 

Louis de Leon, the publisher of St. Theresa, is 
the most submissive poet of Christendom. His 
genius is that of obedience. But he is an inspired 
poet ; he touches the foundation of Christianity ; he 
sings with the soul of St. Pauline and St. Augustine ; 
this resembles very little the official sonnets of the 
Cardinals Bembo and Bentivoglio ; is not this sub- 
lime burst a heresy ? They cast him into prison, 
where he passes five years. It is the same with St. 
John de Ribeira. 

Why had they not been alarmed by St. Theresa ? 
How could the princes of the Church follow her 
soul of fire to those divine heights'? St. Theresa, 
urged by the breath from on high, is the ideal of 
those famous virgins by Murillo, which fill Spain. 
You have at least seen the copies of them here. A 
divine tempest leads her along upon the clouds ; the 
breath of the Eternal passes through her hair ; the 
disk of incantation is beneath her feet ; in her look 
she breathes over the abyss, all the love of heaven 
and earth. Are not so many passionate aspirations 
after things above, a schism which would take a 
deeper and deeper root in things here below ? This 
peril must be got rid of ; this was the first thought. 
Sister of Louis of Granada, of St. John de la 



THE WORLD LEADS HER BACK. 115 

Croix, of St. John of Ribeira, the day comes at 
last when St. Theresa is persecuted in her turn, by 
the ecclesiastical authorities ; she finally exclaims in 
despair: u It is time to free ourselves from these 
good intentions, which have already cost us so 
dear!" 

What does all this signify 1 It is one of the 
strangest signs of the modern world, and you will 
allow, the most surprising of schisms. The Saints 
obliged to rid themselves of their good intentions ! 
The Church striking at herself, and no longer recog- 
nizing her own ! She only returns to them when 
she is warned by the sentiments and the fidelity of 
the multitude. The world leads her back to God ; 
it is no longer she who leads the world thither. 
She would be saved, like all the things of the earth, 
by political combinations, or at least by political 
virtues ; like those governments which, even in 
danger, dread the enthusiasm of their first principle. 

Whoever talks to her of the heroism, of the sanc- 
tity of primitive days, and wishes to bring them back 
again, passes already for a suspicious person. That 
happened even to Ignatius Loyola; when he was 
but a hermit, the ecclesiastical authority takes him 
for an heresiarch ; at a later period, policy bought 
back the saint. 

The Italian Church, in the course of her history, 
has passed from the epoch of the Apostles to that 
of the Saints, from the saints to the doctors, from the 
doctors to the legates, the nuncios, the princes of 



116 THE OLD ANCHORITES. 

the Church ; is it this last diplomatic epoch that she 
wishes to make eternal 7 

So extraordinary a situation has produced, in the 
very enclosure of the faith, a result which is not less 
extraordinary. In face of the ecclesiastical govern- 
ment, which is hesitating, and has lost its star, I see 
forming attempts at reform that I may call despe- 
rate ; these two efforts to escape from the Italian 
influence spring from Catholic France ; one is that 
of Ranee, the other Port Royal. 

In both I distinguish the same principle ; at Port 
Royal as in La Trappe, solitaries of an entirely new 
species, the like of whom the Papacy had never before 
seen. Lend me your attention on this point, which 
is decisive. 

What had the solitaries, the anchorites in the 
Catholic world, been hitherto ? Men, who, in the 
seclusion of their grottos, remained in intimate com- 
munion with the visible Church. They collected, 
they heaped up within themselves, their thoughts in 
solitude ; when the time had come, they rose in the 
government of the Church ; the anchorite became a 
pontiff. From the depths of the Thebaid, St. An- 
thony re-appeared in the midst of Alexandria, Saint 
Athanasius in the midst of the Council; they brought 
back the meditations of the desert to the common 
source. The majesty, the inspiration of solitude 
was for them only a preparation for reaching after- 
wards a superior inspiration deposited in the body of 
the clergy. 



RANCE. 117 

Such is the history of all those who founded Ca- 
tholicism. The St. Gregorys of Nazianzen, the St. 
Basils, the St. Chrysostoms, the St. Augustines, 
began by being hermits; they afterwards quitted 
this communion with the invisible, to enter into 
constant communion with the visible Church. From 
being only hermits, they became priests, bishops, 
pontiffs ; more and more they tend to identify them- 
selves with the power of the clergy ; and it seems 
that in entering into the Church they enter more 
into God. 

Now, it is quite the contrary which happens. 
Behold the saint of the age of Louis XIV., the great 
M. de Ranee. He comes in his youth to Eome ; he 
sees the sanctuary near, he touches with his hands 
the principle of the Italian theology ; he is in the 
intimacy of the Papacy ; and after that, what is the 
cry that escapes him ? Ah ! it explains the w T hole 
subsequent course of his life ! " Rome," exclaims 
he, " is as insupportable to me as the court formerly 
was." That is to say, just now Rome was mis- 
trusting the saints, and at present it is the saints 
who mistrust Rome. Let us pursue the subject. 

Ranee departs ; all his Christian ardor is consi- 
dered by the Cardinals and the Holy See, only as 
the eccentricity of a nobleman, a French fury, furia 
Franceses as they called it, with a smile. Let us 
allow them to rail at this intrepid soul ; while they 
are smiling, he goes in spite of them and founds the 
last order of Roman Catholicism, that which ex- 



118 " brother! we must die." 

presses with a great depth of meaning, the intensely 
sad situation of the Church. 

We must know what the funereal character of 
the Constitutions of La Trappe signifies ; since they 
have resisted time and nature, it is not merely the 
result of the whim of a great Seigneur. 

What a strange spectacle ! While the clergy is 
boasting of its renaissance y here are men who enter 
into death and desolation more than had ever yet 
been done. They celebrate with an inexorable 
sadness anticipated funerals. For whom do these 
men wear mourning for two centuries past? To 
whom is addressed their u brother, we must die ? ,y 
Who is the dead whom we must weep for with them 
unceasingly % Is it the world % Is it the Church % 
Is it both % There is here a mystery that we must 
fathom. 

That which distinguishes the new saints, and in 
particular Ranee, is an incredible repugnance to 
enter into the official clergy. The idea of a regular 
convent fills him with horror: " I! put on the 
monk's frock /" he exclaims with disgust. What, 
then, does this great heart desire, which opposes to 
the piety of Jesuitism the loyalty of the old French 
noble 1 

He is in the same situation in regard to the Church 
that the ancient Anchorites were in regard to the 
world ; he scans it with his eyes, and does not find a 
single shelter in it pure enough to take up his abode 
in. Hence he wishes in some manner to shun the 



PRINCIPLE OF THE TRAPPISTS DESPAIR. 119 

Church itself, as the others were shunning nature 
and the world ; he wishes that his order should be 
in the Church as if it were there no longer ; the 
means to accomplish this is to bury it with his own 
hands. 

A solitude incomparably greater than that of all 
the anchorites, the hermits, the monks of the Mid- 
dle Ages ! For these last were only isolated from 
nature and civil society ; they remained in perpetual 
communion with the Church. Canonical authority, 
living tradition, the Holy See, the movement of that 
great universal body reached the doors of each monas- 
tery, by a hundred invisible ways : Rome resounded 
in every cell. But here, in this sepulchre of La 
Trappe, men have raised barrier upon barrier to 
keep themselves separated even from the voice of 
their church, as from an impure and earthly sound. 
" I submitted," says Ranee, u not to have connec- 
tions with any one, because I thought there was no 
connection that was not dangerous."* 

It is asked, what is the principle of this order of 
Trappists in its relations with Rome. From what I 
have said it is easy to see that this principle is de- 
spair. The significancy of Ranee, his value in the 
history of Christianity, is, that he felt at the sight of 
the Roman Church, grief, and fear, such as she her- 
self could no longer feel. His greatness is that he 
found this grief incurable. 

* Life of Eance, by M. de Chateaubriand, page 184. 



120 PRESENTIMENT OF DESOLATION. 

Before him, the legislators of all the orders had 
always had the formal end in view, of fortifying the 
general action of the clergy ; there was a great fund 
of hope, of confidence in the future ; they wished to 
associate themselves with the movement of life and 
of tradition. 

In the order of the Trappists, seen in its profund- 
ity, the first idea, the foundation stone is, that tradi- 
tion is closed, that henceforth it is useless to remain 
in communication with it, that the book is finished, 
the life of Roman Catholicity concluded, that there 
is no room to turn over the page, that everything is 
said, consummated — that is, that there is nothing 
left to be done but to perform its funerals. Gather 
up the words that escape from Ranee ; we find him 
seized with terror at sight of the maxims, the means, 
the religious Machiavelism that Italy puts in opera- 
tion to save the Italian Church ; all his discourses 
end in this, that we shall see in a short time an almost 
general desolation. This presentiment of desolation 
in the Church becomes with him the very principle 
of his institution. 

What can there be in common, say we, between 
this establishment of weepers and the modern Church 
in the brilliancy of her renaissance % It is an ana- 
chronism, this permanent image of mourning, this 
dress of fatal augury, these living lamentations be- 
fore the portico of St. Peter ? Why tear the bosom 
when everything prospers ? 

For my own part, on the contrary, I fancy that 



FUNERALS. 121 



this institution of fear and repentance is the very 
thing that was most suited to the real, not the appa- 
rent, situation of the Church. While the Papacy 
and Jesuitism, the Innocents and the Alexanders, 
were giving up the Christ to Machiavel, there was, 
indeed, a need of finding somewhere inconsolable 
men, who should weep eternally over this fall. The 
w r ooden cross of the Trappists expiates day and night 
the golden cross of the Cardinals : Ranee expiates 
Loyola. The one is at the same time the conse- 
quence and the contradiction of the other. 

A new thing, indeed, that a saint should establish 
an order, as a sign prophetic of death, in the face of 
all Catholicity. Jeremiah the prophet, also, had 
covered himself with hair-cloth and ashes in the face 
of Jerusalem; and no one had comprehended the 
warning. Another day he had broken a vase in 
pieces before Judea. Ranee does something simi- 
lar ; he gives his establishment the figure of a sepul- 
chre, spread out before the visible Church, and the 
Church understands it not. 

His monks dig each day a grave ; men think that 
the grave is for themselves, that it has no other 
meaning, and they do not see that the last of the 
orders is wearing, in advance, mourning for all the 
rest! They do not see that this prophetic grave 
increases each day in a superhuman manner, under 
the hands of these men, in order to contain finally all 
the old society that the French Revolution will soon 
cast into it. 

c 



122 THE MOURNERS FOR AN EPOCH. 

The Trappists have survived all the orders, as the 
grave-digger survives funerals. Even now, without 
being moved by any of the passions of our days, 
without mingling at all in the agitations of the 
Church, they remain coldly erect and impassible, 
like the genius of death ; and the pit they have not 
ceased to dig, cries out yet, and calls for him w T ho 
should fill it. These Cenobites, as their founder 
wished, have no longer anything of the human me 
about them. Living signs, prophetic figures of de- 
solation in the Church, let these modern Jeremiahs, 
covered with hair-cloth and ashes, quietly utter their 
dumb language to the modern Jerusalem, till at last 
they are understood. 

For they are mourners not for themselves, but for 
an epoch. This order of grave-diggers is the living 
funeral oration of all which is not immortal in Chris- 
tianity. 

If such is the most profound significance of La 
Trappe, on the other hand, Port-Royal is a second 
attempt of Catholic France to steal away from Rome : 
let us explain ourselves. 

I see rising up far from the world of Louis XIV., 
a quiet asylum, consecrated to prayer and penitence- 
There is no external parade, no effort of skill to 
make it attractive. It possesses the greatest orator 
of the times ;* it might make use of his eloquence 
to appeal to the world ; but it imposes silence upon 

* M. Lemaitre. 



PORT-ROYAL. 123 



him and chooses for the organ of all, the least elo- 
quent of all.* The odor of sincerity which exhales 
from Port-Royal is the sole charm it permits itself. 
Attracted by this odor of truth, I see arising first in 
this place, men who already seem to me full of the 
Christian life. Saint Cyran, Lemaitre, Singlin, 
picture anew to me the penitence of the anchorites 
of the primitive ages ; I breathe something of the 
life of the solitaries of the Thebaid, at the same time 
that I hear at the threshold the murmur of the great 
age. One after the other Pascal, Nicole, Arnauld, 
Racine yields to this prestige of sanctity; these 
places become sacred to me. 

Each moment a group detaches itself from the 
seventeenth century and comes to renew itself in 
this holy society. In the midst of the splendor of 
Louis XIV., this point of the earth attracts me more 
and more ; I recognize there the imitation of what I 
best love, of what I have often read in St. Jerome 
and St. Augustine ; in spite of what is called the 
pride of philosophy, I feel myself touched by so 
much piety, so much real holiness, which contrasts 
even with the pomp of austerity of La Trappe. I 
wish myself to follow these groups ; I attach myself 
to their footsteps ; I approach their blest abodes ; 
but at this very moment I see the hand of the Church 
extend itself, and come with an incredible violence to 
overthrow this asylum before my eyes, to drive aw r ay 

* M. Singlin. See Port-Royal, by M. Sainte Beuve. 



124 ONLY ONE WAY OF ESCAPE. 

these penitents, to destroy everything to the last 
stone, to tear from the earth the bodies of the saints 
and cast them to the winds. Let everything be 
razed and extirpated, cries a voice of wrath ; it is 
that of the Holy See : evellatur et eradicetur! This 
seems to me a dream ; all my thoughts of it are 
overturned ; but this dream is on the contrary the 
most real thing of the seventeenth century. 

In astonishment, I seek to discover the cause of 
this fury ] with a little attention I soon find it. 

It is certain, indeed, that to escape from the om- 
nipotence of Rome, such as the Council of Trent 
and Jesuitism have constituted it, I perceive but a 
single way for Christians ; it is that to which Port- 
Royal has been impelled, as naturally and as irresis- 
tibly as Luther. We are astonished that both should 
have proclaimed, with the nothingness of man, with 
the abolition of freedom of the will, the despotism 
of God ; and we do not see that this was the only 
mode to emancipate one's self. 

In order to escape from the overwhelming power 
of the Church, it was necessary to oppose to her a 
power more overwhelming still ; it was necessary 
in some sort to exaggerate the power of God, in 
order to make the power of the priest grow pale and 
perish. The tyranny of heaven was a means of 
withdrawing one's self from the tyranny of the earth. 
It is the maxim of the Reformers, it is also that of 
Port-Royal. God does everything by his sole will ; 
man can nothing, is nothing, does nothing. Do 



SAINT CYRAN. 125 



you not see that this principle contains in itself as 
an ultimate consequence, the diminution or rather 
the deposition of the priest? What need of him if 
everything is done without him 1 All that Luther 
gives to God he takes away from the Church. These 
maxims link together perfectly, far from being con- 
tradictory as is thought. 

Yes, things had reached such a point in the six- 
teenth century, that man, to rid himself of the abso- 
lute power of the Holy See and the external Church, 
found no other means but to throw himself away, to 
ruin himself, to precipitate himself into the depths 
of God. In this way he succeeded in escaping. 
Every other issue was closed. 

Whether they were conscious of it or no, this was 
the basis on w T hich rested the great men of Port- 
Royal. Listen to the good genius of the place, 
Saint Cyran ; he explains in perfectly clear terms the 
cause of so many persecutions : " I have long been 
a prisoner for this truth, that God must first change 
and renew the heart, before the priest undertakes to 
absolve the soul. 5 ' You hear him ; he thinks to give 
God the precedence of the priest ; this is exactly 
the contrary of modern Rome, w T hich everywhere 
gives the priest precedence of God. He starts from 
within, from the internal, the invisible ; Rome, on 
the contrary, wishes to begin from without, from the 
visible, the external. 

I find, thus, two ways opening themselves ; the 
one represented by the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, 



126 TWO CATHOLICISMS. 

the other by the Spiritual Letters of Saint Cyran. 
In the one I am a mute instrument in the hands of 
an instructor. This is the way which is glorified by 
the Church. In the other I am brought, face to 
face, alone with God, the principal conductor of 
souls. This is the way which seems to lead great 
hearts ; it is this which gives birth to Pascal and 
Nicole. It is this which is condemned. 

In truth, here are two different Catholicisms. In 
this alternative, which shall I follow 1 In the first, 
I see, in each line, the power of the visible Church 
brought into suspicion. In ten thousand priests^ not 
one! Who says that? It is again the saint of Jan- 
senism, Saint Cyran. And, thenceforth, what be- 
comes of the parade, the external power of the 
priesthood ? In the second Catholicism on the con- 
trary, in that of Rome, I am, it is true, on the side 
of authority, of the official government; but what 
becomes of the invisible Church ? What becomes of 
all the spiritual maxims of the early fathers, the in- 
ternal spirit of St. Augustine? We must, with 
Pius V. and Gregory XIII. , condemn what the coun- 
cils of Africa and Orange have proclaimed, that is, 
we must overthrow in modern, what was built up 
in ancient times. After that, the priest, always 
present, hides from me the God within. 

Here, then, in all truth, is my situation. What 
is to be done ? If I attach myself to Port Royal, I 
have for me the primitive times of the Church, and 
against me, the last three centuries of the Papacy ; 



WHICH ROAD? 127 



if I attach myself to Rome I have on my side the 
authority of recent times ; but I have against me, it 
seems, the whole spirit of Christian antiquity ! 

The clergy mistrusts the saints, the saints mis- 
trust the clergy. This is the amount of all- that pre- 
cedes. Between these two Churches, which road 
shall I take ? 

0, Pascal, you w T ho perceived all this from afar, 
who saw beforehand the uncertainties and the 
struggles of our age, who know that we talk not of 
such things as these for our amusement, but that we 
seek the truth alone ; martyr of thought, who now 
see into the depths of that abyss that made you 
shudder, tell us, what must we do 1 For here, after 
. two centuries, is the heritage you have left us. On 
one side the Church of the South ; she is always 
erect ; but near her is the genius of cunning, which 
you struck at, and since you refused to enter into her 
alliance when she had not yet borne all her fruits, 
it is still more impossible for me to give myself up 
to her, now that she has borne them all. I might 
perhaps find peace where you yourself found it, in 
that renewed Church of the desert, of St. Jerome 
and St. Augustine. But that Church in which you 
found repose is accursed ; that holy house which 
had saved you from yourself and the world, is razed 
as a house of filth ; you entered there as into a 
haven ; and you entered into the interdict. On one 
hand Jesuitism stigmatized by you, on the other, 



128 THE NEW PAPACY. 

Port-Royal stigmatized by Rome ; such is the alter- 
native you have left us. 

What shall I say, then, in so strange a situation? 
I will say that the Christ with folded arms^ is not the 
Christ who embraces the world. I will say that the 
Roman, Italian Church, is not alone the universal 
Church ; and since they leave me no other alterna- 
tive but Jesuitism or anathema, I will say that I am 
obliged to strike out a path for myself, which is 
neither the one nor the other, neither Jesuitism nor 
Jansenism, neither Rome nor Port-Royal. 

It is not I who speak thus, I should not put my- 
self so easily on the stage ; it is the end of the 
seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth century 
that holds this language. Catholicism was divided 
against itself. The external Church was overthrown 
by Port-Royal, the internal Church by Rome ; the 
spiritual direction which till then had ruled the 
world, was disappearing. In this interregnum of 
the Church humanity must find an issue, or be buried 
in the grave of Ranee. The earth had need of 
another Papacy ; we shall soon see what was the 
new spiritual power which replaced in a moment all 
the others. This irresistible Papacy which takes its 
seat almost without contradiction upon the deserted 
Holy See of humanity, during the eighteenth cen- 
tury, is philosophy. 

It has only to appear ; the age submits without a 
murmur to this new pontificate of the Spirit, because. 



PONTIFICATE OF THE SPIRIT. 129 

under a new form, it recognizes the marks of the 
ancient power which had hitherto moved the world. 
This consecrates in advance the legitimacy of this 
age ; it has not overthrown, but displaced the 
Church ; it has not turned the times upside down, 
like a usurper. It is not an age of bastardy, which 
mingles without right in the lineage of Christian 
ages. No ; it has inherited legitimately the mitre, 
and the triple crown, that were not carried high 
enough in Rome. It has legitimately inherited the 
living God ; it is through him, that in spite of the 
swoon of the Church, there has been no interregnum 
in the kingdom of the Spirit. But let us not antici- 
pate this great subject; let us reserve it entire for 
another occasion* 



VII. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND PHILOSOPHY. 



Eighteenth Century. 



Italy had her eighteenth century two hundred 
years before we had ours. Then were brilliant 
talents, an incomparable hardihood, and the zeal of 
martyrs, but all of no avail. Society does not re- 
spond to the appeal ; we meet with intrepid heads 
of schools; they only want disciples. Persecution, 
that charm of the strong, attracts no one to their 
side ; no popularity attaches itself to their name. 
After these first conflicts, it is certain that the 
Church, which continued to fear heresy, might well 
think she had nothing to fear from philosophy. 

There must have been a serious reason why this 
great cry of independence should find no echo. 
The Inquisition alone will not explain it. The 
truth is that Cesalpini, Pomponati, Patrizzi, those 
great precursor minds, the better to escape from Ro- 
man Catholicism, had placed themselves out of the 
spirit of Christianity itself. From their first bound 
they are out of the pale of modern society. Abol- 
ishing in their thought the sixteen centuries of the 



FIRST OUTBREAK OF PHILOSOPHY. 131 



Christian world as a subtle dream, they fell back 
immediately upon the philosophy of Paganism. 
They continued with genius, Heraclides, Parmenides, 
and Plato ; they became as citizens of Alexandria ; 
but in this violent movement out of their times, the 
world lost sight of them : wandering in the past> 
living society knew them not. 

Add to this, that in depriving themselves of Chris- 
tianity, they deprived themselves of a certain supe- 
riority. That became evident, when from abstrac- 
tions they passed to political theories. Unwilling to 
admit anything of the genius of Christianity, all the 
publicists of this school, Machiavel, Sarpi, Paruta ? 
begin by denying right, they only acknowledged 
might. This result might please governments, but 
was incapable of winning popularity. It was in- 
stinctively felt that these publicists w T ere inferior in 
principle to the modern Church. Thenceforth, it 
was in vain for them to agitate ; they armed a glo- 
rious past against an inert present ; but all glorious 
as this past was, it w T as not for this that the world 
was to be shaken. 

When this first explosion of the philosophic spirit 
In its spontaneity was exhausted, there arose in the 
South another generation of thinkers — men out of 
tune, disconcerted, who purchased each of their 
boldnesses by a concession. These are Vanini, Pa- 
ruta. The first, whom Rome burned as an atheist^ 
passed in England for a fanatic. As for Paruta, 
imagine a Machiavel whose lofty phrase has been 



132 FRENCH PHILOSOPHY. 

dislocated and attenuated by fear of the Inquisitions 
He envelopes his thought in the folds and duplica- 
tions of his senatorial language , like a poignard un- 
der a Venetian cloak. At the close of his work, 
when he has sufficiently commented on the state 
policy, and the dark precautions of the decrepid ge- 
nius of the city of Doges, to atone for all this, he 
falls on his knees in the last chapter, and makes be- 
fore his readers a public confession, an act of 
declamatory compunction. 

Thus ends, under the terror of the Church, the 
outbreak of philosophy in the sixteenth century. 
The spirit of Machiavel, on its knees, strikes its 
bosom, and whispers a prayer ; this prayer lasts yet. 

If the French philosophy of the eighteenth cen- 
tury had again entered upon this ambiguous path, it 
would doubtless have experienced the same fate ; 
the world would not have been moved by it ; happily 
it took quite the contrary course. How so ? It 
showed the world an idea superior to that of the 
Church ; and at the same moment, the Church felt 
itself struck by weapons it no longer possessed. It 
found itself face to face with a power which, while 
denying all forms, all sects, all particular churches, 
and, in some sort, visible Christianity, still retained 
what is most vital in Christianity — its spirit. 

As long as there had been set up in opposition to 
the Roman Church, another church, whether Pro- 
testant, Greek, or Jansenist, the former had been 
able to take hold of its adversary, and resist its 



HAS THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT. 133 

blows ; they were forces of the same nature ; there 
was for that a tradition of controversies which might 
last indefinitely. If she was attacked, she had, on 
the other hand, a hold upon an enemy of the same, 
family. It was a conflict between two churches ; 
they disputed about their forms. But here was a 
totally different adversary — the very fruit of Chris- 
tianity, the spirit ? the soul of it, wdiich, developed, 
and divested of forms, turns against the very princi- 
ple of forms ; the body of Christianity is on one side ? 
the spirit on the other. Jacob is assailed in the 
darkness by the invisible, invincible, impalpable 
wrestler. It is the combat between the Church, and 
philosophy in the eighteenth century. 

Let us go a step farther ; without going out of the 
tradition of Christian societies, let us seek for the 
signification of this epoch. Is there nothing like it 
in history? Cannot the monuments of the Church 
itself show us how Providence acts, when it w r ishes 
to communicate to any society a new infusion of the 
spirit of life ? Can we not re-attach to sacred his- 
tory this great, accursed age ? 

What it is most reproached for is, that it has sud- 
denly isolated itself from the tradition of all the rest ; 
but there are times when this very isolation is of 
divine appointment. Let us be more clear. 

When the Hebrews, in order that they may draw 
after them the rest of the world, are ready to receive 
the baptism and the spirit of the future, Providence 
leads them to the valley and the idols of Egypt. It 



134 MIGRATION OF THE MODERN WORLD. 

conducts them forty years in the desert ; there the 
prophetic people receives the education of the future. 
This solitude becomes the era of its regeneration ; 
as soon as it is renewed, it sets about building up 
future society. 

In the same way the eighteenth century, entire, is 
torn away from its valley of Egypt — leaves behind 
what it has adored, and the Pharaohs pursue it more 
than a day's journey. It is led astray by those who 
conduct it. It is a desert, if you will ; for the insti- 
tutions, the customs, the religious rites over, every- 
thing which sheltered the past, crumbles. A shore 
from which the sea has retired does not appear more 
devastated ; it is a desert, but full of the miracles of 
the understanding. There are lightnings which illu- 
mine the horizon ; they show the way. The modern 
man is there, apart from the old society, without any 
mediator, face to face with reason and the soul ; he 
receives, in some sort, the revelation, and the tables 
of the law of the Spirit, pure ; his education, amid 
the silence of all the other ages, is so powerfully 
conducted, that he can never be entirely repossessed 
by the genius of the past; finally, he quits this soli- 
tude to found the new city. 

Thus the eighteenth century is the migration of 
the modern world, passing from one social form to 
another ; it is not merely an epoch, it is an era. 

But this era is the era of impiety ! doubt, scepti- 
cism, genius of the void, of sensation, and what not ! 
It is easy, from the height of a laborious orthodoxy, 



FAITH IN THE THOUGHT. 135 

to hurl these anathemas against this epoch. It re- 
mains to be seen what foundation there is for this 
interdiction. 

The future is always sceptical in regard to the 
past, since it separates from it. Evidently the eight- 
eenth century has ceased believing in many things ; 
but it is equally certain that the foundation of this 
age is a universal faith in what is most important in 
the heritage of Christianity — I mean, in the power 
of the invisible, of the thought. By this are united 
all the men of this time : the remembrance of one 
almost necessarily recalls another. 

What then ! they have against them at first, all 
the powers of the earth ; yet they undertake to 
change everything, and that not even by a regular 
association, but by a fortuitous coincidence of senti- 
ments and ideas. Force, wealth, power, possession 
of the ages — what is wanting to those whom they 
attack? And yet a few writers, who hardly know 
each other, are about to destroy all this by the magic 
of a word ! 

They believe to such an extent in thought, that 
they are persuaded that all the rest is nothing — that 
an idea is sufficient to renovate, to nourish the world 
— that humanity possesses energy enough in itself 
to throw off the whole burden of the times, and re- 
construct, at a given moment, a new world upon a 
new ideal. Are these materialists 1 Are these 
sceptics, who believe that our soul can create a new 
universe ? And yet they would cut off from the 



136 THE KINGDOM OF SPIRITS. 

living tradition of French philosophy, these men, 
who will always be the focus of it. Because they 
could not find in Jean Jacques Rousseau, an array 
of school formulas, I have seen the time when they 
refused him the title of Philosopher ; without reflect 
ing that one may all his life handle and make a 
parade of formulas, without having the least particle 
of a philosophic spirit, which is truly the spirit of 
creation. 

There is no one who has not thought himself 
obliged in conscience, to cast the stone at this adul- 
terous age. The truth is, the classifiers of schools 
do not know what to make of these great figures ; 
they want, like the herbalists, dead systems, that 
they can arrange, one after the other, in their cabi- 
nets ; but men who are at once speech, movement, 
reality, living systems — what an embarrassment ! It 
is not the abstraction of life, it is life itself. 

Whither were we going by this narrow path? 
We were placing in the first rank of philosophers, 
such men as Reid and Dugald Stewart, because 
these honest writers assured us that according to the 
common meaning, they consented to believe in the 
understanding. And we were rejecting from this 
pretended spiritualism, our great men who, by an 
heroic movement of the soul, founded in the eight- 
eenth century, the true kingdom of spirits. We 
were imprisoning ourselves in the insular letter of I 
know not what Scotch philosophy ! and quitting the 
great way, the national way, the royal w T ay of tradi- 



MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM. 137 

tion and the word of life ! Let us hasten to return 
to it. 

Yes, let us return to the intelligence of this great 
age, and not allow ourselves to be amused by words. 
Whoever does not see a philosophy proclaim spiritu- 
alism, accuses it of having only comprehended mat- 
ter ; let us enter more deeply into things. 

It is not enough for a philosophy to murmur ex- 
ternally a form of idealism, of heroism, in order to 
belong truly to the kingdom of the spirit. One may 
be very materialist while all the time talking of the 
idea. And on the other hand, an age which makes 
no public pretension to idealism, but which puts it 
in practice, and makes it pass into the life, this is 
truly an idealist age — it makes spiritualism a reality. 
By this test, show me an epoch in all the past, which 
has had more faith in the soul, which has shown 
more of it, which has expended more of it, which, 
to obtain the victory, has had less need of the phy- 
sical forces. It is the moment when speech, till 
then buried in mystery, becomes life, reality. In a 
political point of view, France is crushed by the 
enemy ; to judge her only by the eyes of the body, 
you would think her powerless. It is, on the con- 
trary, the moment w T hen she reigns, with an uncon- 
tested power, over the universe ; her arms are tied, 
but she commands the world. What is this, then, 
but the reign of the spirit ? Because it has become 
visible, do you no longer see it % 

When it formerly dwelt in the Church, and was 



138 heg£l ? s opinion. 

veiled, you supposed it present. It quits the Church, 
and passes into the age ; because it comes nearer to 
you, do you not recognize it 1 

Ah ! we have sinned against this age ; and in 
saying so, I accuse no one in particular ; but I am 
in accordance with the highest philosophic authority 
of our times. While in our own country, every 
man who pretends to philosophy thinks it proper 
and in good taste to begin by repudiating this emi- 
nently French age, is it not extraordinary that the 
great master of abstraction, par excellence^ a foreigner, 
Hegel, salutes it, on the contrary, as the fundamen- 
tal era of thought?* The only enthusiastic page, 
perhaps, that this great mind has written, marks the 
spiritualist genius of our eighteenth century. After 
this, will any one have the courage to see in this 
heroic season of the human mind, nothing but what 
the schools call the doctrine of sensation ?f 

Let us go back to the cause of all that we see, 
and speak seriously. After the double invasions of 
1814 and 1815, under the burden of a million of* 
enemies, the spirit of France for a moment, as it 
were, lost itself. The genius of the eighteenth 
century had for its apostle in the world the French 
Revolution; this revolution was vanquished; how 
explain this mystery ? Let us accuse no one ! The 

* Das Geistreich selbst. 

t In Italy, Eomini continues this war of train-bands long 
after it is at an end. 



IMMOLATION; 139 



circumstances were overwhelming, and perhaps we 
ourselves should not have done otherwise. 

The first thought that came into the minds of some 
men, was to impute wrong to the eighteenth century. 
They thought that heaven had pronounced against 
it, that the nations had armed themselves to abolish 
it ; for fear of being included in what they imagined 
to be its defeat, they determined to repudiate it. 
After having sacrificed the national standard y they 
sacrificed, one after another, Voltaire, Rousseau, and 
all the great representatives of this epoch ; they im- 
molated themselves. Persuaded thus that it was 
not only to escape defeat, but to take part with the 
conquerors, they placed themselves out of all reality, 
all life. In this abstraction, which was at bottom 
mere nothingness, many fancied that they stood upon 
an immovable rock, above all the anguish of their 
country. 

From this empty sophism, they came to the con- 
viction that no one had been conquered at Water- 
loo, and that, thenceforth, it only remained to 
embrace the law and the future which sprang out of 
that day. With a little subtlety, they resigned them- 
selves for ever to accept as a victory, unanswerable 
for all the world, what the land of France persisted 
in lamenting as an unforeseen blow, from which it 
must absolutely recover itself. 

In fact, upon this battle-field, as a gage of recon- 
ciliation, was abandoned without sepulture what was 
thought a great dead, namely, the eighteenth century. 



140 THE MEN OF THE PAST RETURN. 

They gave up without ransom, each of those brilliant 
glories, each of those spirits of light which had borne 
the banner of France. That was the worst of 
capitulations. 

You know what happened to a captured town in 
ancient times ; the first thought of the victors was 
to plunder its lares and penates. They treated the 
French Revolution in the same way ; they gave up 
to the past the lares and penates of the future. 

This explains many things to us. These minds 
had, among other missions, that of fighting against 
the dead letter ; they served the world as barriers 
against the undertakings of ultramontanism. These 
barriers having been given up by us, in a moment of 
fainting, what happens ? The men of the past return 
by avenues they have not even had strength enough 
to open for themselves ; they march over ruins that 
they knew not how to make. 

But these pretended ruins rise again of them- 
selves ; and the genius of the eighteenth century, 
which they thought was beaten down, has only been 
developing and confirming itself in the world. After 
1814 and 1815, it was life itself that we gave up, 
thinking to yield only ashes. If we had risen to a 
higher thought, we should have seen that Waterloo 
was not the last word of France ; that it was one of 
those days for which, sooner or later, under one 
form or another, there must be a retaliation ; and, 
hence, it was the worst of philosophic conclusions 



RESULTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 141 

to abandon, and immolate the representatives of the 
French movement. 

In fact, this is what was passing abroad in this 
respect. While we were giving up our moral force, 
and France, like Samson, was abandoning her hair to 
the scissors, it came to pass that all the men who 
pretended to an extraordinary power over their 
epoch, put themselves in intimate communication 
with our eighteenth century. 

At the moment when it was in good taste in 
France to abjure Voltaire, it was with Gothe that he 
found a shelter. Gothe received this great exile ; 
he learned from him the magic gift to communicate 
life, electricity, to multitudes. He translated Diderot. 
Lord Byron made himself the disciple of J. J. Rous- 
seau ; he attempted to unite together the soul of 
the author of the Confessions and that of the old 
man of Femey. With the vast horizon that it opens, 
the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar re- 
appears in other terms in that philosophic theology 
which extends from Kant to Schleiermacher. The 
vast labors of the greatest critic of the present time, 
M. de Wette, do they not very often seem commen- 
taries upon opinions hazarded by Voltaire ? 

Thus after immense labors, men returned to the 
results perceived by the eighteenth century. Hegel 
proclaimed its metaphysical foundation, Gothe its 
literature as the source of life ; De Wette confirmed 
its criticism ; so that one may say, that the whole 
contemporary movement is a new development, a 



142 VOLTAIRE* 



new power of the spirit of that same age. We were 
abjuring it among ourselves at the very moment 
when it remained victorious. 

Let us, then, salute anew those magnificent hos- 
tages ! They return to us tested, glorified by exile ; 
they have done abroad the work of France, when 
she thought herself abandoned by God and men ! 
They have conquered when we renounced the strife ; 
men called them dead, but see how they have fought 
— -better than the living. But if they return, it is 
w T ith a new signification ; let us replace them in our 
minds in their legitimate places. We shall thus 
efface the most visible trace of the devastations which 
follow defeat. 

I follow with my eyes, during forty years, the reign 
of a man who is the sole spiritual direction, not of 
his country, but of his epoch. From the retirement 
of his chamber, he governs the kingdom of minds : 
intelligences regulate themselves every day by his ; 
a word written by his hand in a moment overruns all 
Europe. Princes love, kings fear him; they do not 
feel sure of their kingdoms if he is not with them. 
Peoples, on their part, adopt without discussion, and 
repeat with eagerness, every syllable that falls from 
his pen. Who exercises this incredible power, that 
had been nowhere witnessed since the Middle Ages ? 
Is it another Gregory VII. 1 Is it a Pope ? No, it 
is Voltaire. 

How has the power of the first passed to the other ? 
Can it be that the entire earth has been the dupe of 



THE ANGEL OF EXTERMINATION. 143 

an evil genius sent from hell ] Why has this man 
seated himself without a contest upon the throne of 
spirits? It is because, at first, he very often did 
the work reserved in the Middle Age for the papa- 
cy. Wherever violence, injustice breaks forth, there 
I see him strike with the anathema of the spirit. 
What matter though the violence should take the 
name of Inquisition, St. Bartholomew, Holy War % 
He placed himself in a region superior to the papacy 
of the Middle Ages. Dominant over all sects, all 
worships, it was the first time that men saw ideal 
justice strike at violence, or the lie, wherever they 
appeared. 

The Church, no one denies, had committed great 
faults ; it was necessary that they should be sooner 
or later chastised ; and as they were crimes against 
the spirit, it was necessary she should be punished 
by the flagellations of the spirit. Voltaire is the 
angel of extermination sent by God against the sinful 
Church. 

He shakes with a terrible laugh the gates of the 
Church, which, placed by St. Peter, were opened 
for the Borgias. It is the laugh of the universal 
spirit, which disdains all particular forms as so many 
deformities ; it is the ideal w r hich sports with the 
real. In the name of the mute generations whom 
the Church was bound to console, he arms himself 
with all the blood she has shed, all the stakes, all 
the scaffolds she has raised, and which must sooner 
or later Lie turned against her. This irony, mingled 



144 HIS WRATH. 



with wrath, belongs not merely to one individual or 
one question ; then mingles there the laugh of all 
the abused generations, of all the tortured dead, who, 
recollecting that they found on earth violence instead 
of gentleness, the wolf in place of the paschal lamb, 
stir themselves, and mock in their turn, even in the 
depths of the sepulchre. 

That which makes the wrath of Voltaire a great 
act of Providence, is, that he strikes, ridicules, over- 
whelms the infidel Church with the arms of the 
Christian spirit. Humanity, charity, fraternity — 
are not these the sentiments revealed in the Gospel '? 
He turns them with irresistible force against the vio- 
lences of the false teachers of the Gospel. The 
angel of wrath, in the Bible, pours out at once upon 
the condemned cities, sulphur and bitumen, in the 
midst of the blowing of the winds ; so the spirit of 
Voltaire walks over the face of the divine city ; he 
strikes at once with the lightning, the glaive, the 
sarcasm. He pours out gall, irony, and ashes. 
When he is weary, a voice awakens him and cries, 
continue ! Then he begins again ; he becomes fu- 
rious ; he strikes where he has already struck ; he 
shakes what he has already shaken ; he breaks 
what he has already broken. For a work so long, 
never interrupted, and always successful, is not 
merely the affair of an individual ; it is the vengeance 
of a deceived God, who has taken the irony of man 
as an instrument of wrath. 

No, this man does not belong to himself t he is 



PROTESTS AGAINST VIOLENCE. 145 

led by a superior power. At the same time that he 
overturns with one hand, he founds with the other ; 
and there lies the marvel of his destiny. He employs 
all his faculties of raillery to overthrow the banners 
of particular churches, but there is another man in 
him ; this man, full of fervor, establishes upon their 
ruins the orthodoxy of common sense. 

He feels in every fibre the false, the lie, the injus- 
tice, not only in a moment of time, but in each of 
the pulsations of the human race. Particular churches 
had founded the Christian law, but for themselves. 
Voltaire makes the Christian law the common law T of 
humanity. Before his time, they called themselves 
universal; and this universality stopped at the 
threshold of a communion, of a particular church ; 
whoever did not make a part of it, was out of the 
evangelical law. Voltaire envelopes the whole earth 
in the law of the Gospel. 

Whence did this old man of eighty-four obtain the 
force to plead to the last hour for the family of the 
Calas, for the Lievens, the Labarres, men whom he 
knew not ? Where did he learn to feel himself the 
contemporary of all ages, to be wounded in his ut- 
most being by any individual violence committed 
fifteen hundred years ago ? What signifies this uni- 
versal protest of each day against force ? this indig- 
nation that neither remoteness in space, nor centuries 
upon centuries of time, can tranquilize ? What does 
this old man desire, who has but his breath, and w T ho 
7 



146 HTS THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT. 

makes himself the fellow-citizen, the advocate, the 
journalist of all societies, present and past] 

Every morning he wakes, beset by the cries of 
generations, of extinct civilisations ! in the midst of 
the agitations, the distractions of the eighteenth 
century, a cry, a sigh coming from Thebes, from 
Athens, from ancient Rome, from the Middle Age, 
occupies, besets, torments him; it prevents him 
from sleeping ! On the 24th of August, the anni- 
versary of St. Bartholomew, he has a fever. History 
is not a science to him, it is a crying reality. What 
is the strange instinct which urges this man to be 
everywhere alive to, and present in the past ? 
Whence comes this novel charity which traverses 
time and space 1 

What is this, I ask, if it is not the Christian spirit 
itself, the universal spirit of union, fraternity, vigi- 
lance, which lives, feels, suffers, and remains in in- 
timate communion with all humanity, present and 
past? This is the reason why the earth proclaimed 
this man as the living speech of humanity in the 
eighteenth century. Men have not been deceived 
by appearances ; he tears in pieces the letter ; but 
he makes the universal spirit shine forth. For this 
reason we proclaim him still. 

In good faith, w T hat have they opposed to him ? 
What adversary has entered into the strife against 
him? In the camp of the past, where has there ap- 
peared the combatant, who, to conquer Voltaire, 
would have need to show himself more vigilant than 



ROUSSEAU. 



147 



he, more fervent than he, more universal than he, 
in the cause of justice against force and violence ? 

In the precipitate movement of our age, the dust 
has been raised to heaven over the steps of our gene- 
rations ; some persons have exclaimed with joy ; 
Voltaire has disappeared; he has perished in the 
gulf, with all his renown. But this was one of the 
artifices of true glory; the small men alone were the 
dupes of it. The dust falls again ; the spirit of 
light whom they thought extinct, re-appears ; he 
laughs at the false joy of the darkness. Like one 
resuscitated, he shines with a purer brilliancy ; and 
the age which had begun by rejecting him, ends by 
confirming in all his immortal part. 

The work of Voltaire is in necessary relation w T ith 
Catholicism ; even in attacking it, he strikes with 
its own weapon, history. It was necessary, in order 
that the tradition of the eighteenth century should 
be the source of the future world, that there should 
be found a man, who, springing out of Protestantism, 
should represent in the new work the genius of the 
dissenting churches. This man is Rousseau. 

In him, the genius of the religious revolution of 
the sixteenth century mingles itself with the fer- 
ments of France. To take aw T ay from the move- 
ment of the eighteenth century every appearance of 
sectarianism, that it might not be a solely Catholic 
and Roman revolution, this stranger Rousseau must 
issue from the fold of Luther, and bring among us 
something of the spirit of the Doctor of Wittemburg. 



148 HIS SCEPTICISM. 



His arms are those of the Reformation, not history, 
but logic, reason, individual authority and eloquence 
always. Through him, the soul of the revolution of 
the sixteenth century passes into the French Revo- 
lution ; more even than Voltaire, he renders Rome 
irreconcilable with France. 

In the scepticism of the Savoyard Vicar, I discover 
no trace of grief. It is a scepticism of hope rather 
than of disappointment. He confesses himself very 
frankly, he explains, unveils himself. In this doubt, 
I perceive a great commencement of faith ; the Sa- 
voyard Vicar trusts to the times to come to unveil 
what remains obscure to him. Properly speaking, 
he officiates at the altar of the unknown God ! It is 
the first stone of a new society. 

Would you have before your eyes the veritable 
image of scepticism ? One meets with it sometimes 
in our day : I understand by this a scepticism which 
denies itself. Not to dare in a single instance to 
look courageously into the bottom of the soul, but to 
cast at all risks over this incommensurable void, an 
appearance, a shade of credulity never to be remov- 
ed ! To continue this jesting with one's self all 
one's life, to live night and day under a gilded 
mask which one carries to the tomb ! To doubt, 
and not to allow that we desire, that we seek, that 
we expect anything else ! What an overthrow ! 
What an abyss ! This supposes that we despair 
of coming out of it This nothingness which denies 



THE TIARA OF MODERN TIMES. 149 

itself, terrifies me ; I see nothing so miserable in all 
the eighteenth century. 

Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, triple crown 
of that new Papacy that France has shown to the 
earth. From the height of the modern Vatican it 
speaks truly to the city and the world, urbi et orbi. 
It does not address itself merely to the Roman race, 
it invites all the races of humanity ; and the schis- 
matics whom the papacy had not been able to over- 
come, I mean the Germanic, Greek, Sclavonic nations, 
as well as the Latins, the emperors and kings of 
peoples, as well as the kings of the intellect, the 
Guelphs, as well as the Ghibelines, if any remain, 
submit to this orthodoxy of the universal spirit. 
Those whom Gregory VII. had not been able to 
curb, the successors of the emperors, the Great 
Frederick, Catherine, Joseph II., bend the knee ! 
They have discovered a superior power, which gives 
or takes away their crowns ! Like those first kings 
who came out of barbarism, they have recognized 
the supreme seal of the spiritual power ! 

When France, shaking upon her brow this tiara 
of modern times, called the earth to the crusade, 
what was seen ? Armies without food, without shoes, 
without clothing, springing from the soil, veritable 
phantoms which they thought to overthrow with a 
breath. For they had on one side all the powers, 
and, so to speak, all the mandates of matter ! But 
these pretended phantoms were the soldiers of the 
spirit; these armies were the armies of the spirit. 



150 THE SOLDIER OF THE SPIRIT. 



and, therefore, they were naked as the spirit. The 
Crusaders of the Middle Age were not more so. 

I was one day at the death-bed of one of the two 
representatives of the people who were sent to de- 
fend the lines of Wissembourg ; and this is what 
that old man said to me at a moment when one does 
not exaggerate his thought ; I shall not forget it as 
long as I live : "It was we who put the fire to the 
batteries. They were astonished at our calmness ; 
but we had no merit in that ; we knew very well that 
the cannon-balls could do nothing to us." Is that 
the language of a missionary of materialism? I 
doubt not there are in the ecclesiastical body, men 
capable of dying for their faith ; but shall we find at 
the present day, many representatives of the Roman 
papacy, persuaded in the face of a hostile battery, 
not merely that it becomes them to die bravely, but 
that the balls can do nothing against them ? That 
is a very different thing. 

Whence did these men derive this super-human 
force, which seems of a legendary character? From 
the consciousness of the social miracle of which they 
were the artisans. They found it in the same 
sentiment which actuated the first missionaries 
of the papacy among the Barbarians ; these mis- 
sionaries, new converts, were sceptics in regard 
to all the pagan past ; but they were believers in 
regard to all the future which they embraced in 
advance. 

In the triumvirate of Voltaire, Montesquieu and 



RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FUTURE. 151 

Rousseau, one cannot tell what is the particular 
idea which has given birth to the heroism of the 
Revolution ; it is, strictly speaking, no one of their 
maxims, nor even all of them put together; there is 
joined to them something more powerful than all. 
In the depth of the eighteenth century men per- 
ceived in advance the series of consequences, and 
in some manner the whole succession of new ages 
which were to spring from it, and for which they 
were responsible. The entire future rose up before 
them ; it fought in their hearts, under the veil of 
the eighteenth century. 

At the present day they think themselves very 
strong against the spirit when they ask for an ac- 
count of its works. They point with ostentation to 
the cathedrals of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies ; and ask of the new spirit where are hers. 
They must needs see works of stone and of flesh, as 
if they believed only in these. 

If they had asked the question of the yet recent 
papacy, on the morrow of its accession, it would not 
any more have shown its edifices of stone, but would 
have pointed to its buildings of the soul ; the past 
conquered, paganism despoiled, barbarism tamed, the 
unity of the world prepared and foreseen, the earth 
for a time pacified, slavery diminished, if not abo- 
lished, man snatched from fate ; these are the works 
it exhibited to the world, while as yet the basilicas 
of St. Peter, St. John Lateran, and Santa Maria 
Maggiore, had no existence, and the goats fed upon 



152 WORKS OF THE NEW SPIRIT. 

the herbage in the fields of Rome, where, at a later 
day, was to spring up the Vatican of Leo X. 

In the same way, the works of the new spirit, 
which dates but from yesterday, are works of life ; 
they surround you, and as they are not of stone and 
cement, you see them not ! Charity extended to all 
minds, the communion of nations in the same law, 
the executioner, of whom, with M. de Maistre, you 
made the bond of human association, being now only 
its horror, peoples holding to each other through the 
sympathy of a common cause, as they formerly 
touched each other by hatred, the dignity of each 
one saved and established upon the consciousness oi 
the God within, slavery, so long upheld by the 
Church, effaced first by heresy, the unity of humanity 
no longer only imagined but founded, the right divine 
passing from a few to all; behold the new city, 
which is springing up. Already it issues from the 
earth ; it envelopes you ; and yet the blind demand 
where are its towers, where are its basilicas of mar- 
ble and porphyry ! 

They hear the nations who meet and call to each 
other ! and they ask where are the workmen ! They 
are themselves, whatever they may say of it, inwardly 
moved, enlightened, ameliorated ! And they ask if 
anything is doing in the world ! 

For my part, if in the eighteenth century I recog- 
nize the accession of a new spiritual direction, think 
not that I claim for it a new infallibility. Let no 
one accuse me of substituting for the infallibility of 



SEEK A NEW LIFE. 153 

Gregory VII., the infallibility of Voltaire. I do not 
desire to hold back humanity in the eighteenth cen- 
tury any more than in the eleventh. The spirit of 
each is powerful in proportion as it is developed, that 
is, explained by the succession of times. They had 
excommunicated the eighteenth century in the name 
of the dead letter of philosophy. I have shown that 
the basis of this age is not a system but a focus of 
mind. Draw them towards this focus in order to 
extend it. Do not come into this age of life to im- 
prison yourselves there, but, on the contrary, to seek 
there for a new life ! The character of the great men 
who represent it, is that they were precursors : they 
wish for free intelligences, not serfs. You will 
honor them in not imitating them, that is to say, in 
doing what they were not able to do. 



VIII. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE NATIONS. 

One thing strikes the least attentive eyes. The 
chiefs of political power in the eighteenth century, 
princes and kings, yield to the philosophic move- 
ment, until the Revolution breaks out. At sight of 
this, they turn about with violence ; a single day 
carries them back to the Middle Age. One may 
say the same of the Roman Church in the sixteenth 
century. She followed the tendency of the times ; 
without taking alarm, she left herself to change ; 
perhaps she was about to take a decisive step. But 
Luther appears, the Reformation breaks out; a 
terrible light shines in the face of the Holy See. 
From this moment the papacy draws back; it re- 
pulses with both hands the gifts of the future ; every 
day it plunges deeper into the past ; nevertheless, 
its cradle terrifies it as much as its sepulchre. 

The action of the papacy is nowhere more visible 
than in Italy ; it is there that it must be studied 
because it is there that it is altogether mistress. 
That policy rests upon an immense hope to which a 
whole people lends itself. 

From the commencement, one perceives that this 
nation will not have the destiny of the rest. An 



THE CHURCH SACRIFICES ITALY. 155 

extraordinary expectation troubles her \ hardly, after 
the invasions, does she begin, under the administra- 
tion of the Lombards, to take the form of a nation, 
when a hand beckons to the stranger : it is that of 
the papacy. The stranger arrives ; he destroys this 
sketch of an Italian empire ; of its fragments are 
formed, as from the fragments of the shield of Mi- 
nerva, a multitude of petty States. They seek to 
form a union among themselves, but the same genius 
re-appears, and by its presence alone separates them. 

As this genius has, by itself, no material force, it 
is always constrained to call in foreign forces to its 
aid ; so that it prevents the national power from 
developing itself, and finds itself incapable of sup- 
plying its place. Finally, when of all these little 
States there remains only Florence, Clement VII. 
once more calls in the stranger against Florence, 
his native land ; then the Italian nationality perishes 
in its last refuge ; upon its ruins springs up the abso- 
lute power of the modern papacy. 

Why was there not in the Middle Age an outcry 
from the Alps to Calabria, against that strange 
power which prevented Italy from taking her place 
under the sun? Historians have not explained it: 
there never was a greater ambition nourished in any 
people. At the moment even when it was struck, 
this people thought, in immolating itself, to revive 
in the power which was to command the world ; and 
in fact, if the papacy had kept its promises of bring- 
ing the whole earth to the foot of the Vatican, it 



156 ROME BREAKS HER PROMISE. 

would have been, perhaps, a worthy price for the 
lost nationality of Italy. 

Observe that in asking of a whole race of men the 
absolute sacrifice of temporal existence, they engage 
to reign spiritually over the universe ; that alone 
could render legitimate the disappearance of a peo- 
ple. If the Church made a pedestal for herself out 
of the ruin of Italy, it was on condition of bringing 
all humanity into subjection. This is what she w T as 
bound to do, since all the generations of Italy had, 
one after the other, given themselves up under this 
promise. 

Italy has fulfilled the conditions of the contract ; 
she engaged to die : she has kept her word. Has 
Rome kept hers ? 

What would those generations of Guelphs say if 
they could appear again to-day, who disappeared 
from the earth in all the cities of Italy in the Middle 
Age, convinced that in abandoning their country to 
the papacy, they were abandoning it to the power 
which held in the hand all the energy of the future ? 
They would see that power gradually shut up within 
its walls, and, instead of reclaiming dissenting 
Greece, losing, one after the other, Russia, Germany, 
Prussia, Sweden, the Britannic Isles, and, in part, 
France ; crossing the ocean, they would see the 
most living half of a New World torn from Rome 
without a hope of reconciliation ; turning back upon 
Europe, they would find even Spain shaken. What 



DISAPPOINTED HOPES. 157 

would these generations say thenl It is easy to 
imagine. 

Is this the sacred policy for which a whole people 
has consented to disappear from the earth ? Italy 
consented to live upon a Calvary, she suffered a 
passion of eight centuries ! She has been lashed by 
all the soldiers that have passed over her roads ; for 
you had promised her that this passion should serve 
to make the Christ of the Vatican reign through 
you. Instead of that, we find almost everywhere, 
in spite of you, another Church which we know not. 
Where you still remain, other spiritual powers have 
raised themselves up ; and you are much less ad- 
vanced in your victory than in the times when we 
consented to disappear in order to make a stepping- 
stone for you. We have sacrificed ourselves ; but 
it has availed you nothing. You were deceived in 
your hopes ; and in deceiving yourself, you have 
destroyed us, and our children, and our children's 
children. 

These sentiments have been expressed with ex- 
traordinary power by those great writers of the 
Middle Age who preserve the true national tradi- 
tion. So long as there is any hope of saving Italy 
from suicide, we have powerful voices conjuring her 
to stop. If the policy of the Popes is truly a sacred 
policy, and a nation plunges itself into the abyss for 
her sake, and disappears ; it is sublime and Chris- 
tian-like. But on the contrary, if this policy has 
only, like all the rest, a precarious temporal value, 



158 DANTE MACHIAVEL. 

if it is not eternally divine, what an irremediable 
error ! 

This doubt sprang up in some minds as early as 
the thirteenth century. Thence those terrible cries 
of Dante, which have their echo in Petrarch, Boc- 
cacio, and finally in Machiavel ! # Dante, especially, 
makes superhuman efforts to tear away the illusion 
from his country ! Never did Luther, or the Refor- 
mation speak in more violent terms of the papacy. 

* " Since the opinion of some is that trie success of the 
affairs in Italy depends on the Church of Rome, I wish 
to oppose to them some reasons which occur to me, 
and I will bring forward two principal ones which do 
not contradict each other. The first is that through 
the bad example of this Court, this Province has lost all 
piety and all religion ; which produces infinite dis- 
orders: for where there is religion we suppose good, 
and where it is wanting we suppose evil. We Italians 
owe it then to the Church, that we have fallen into irre- 
ligion and corruption ; but there is another and still greater 
obligation which is the cause of our ruin. It is that the 
Church has kept, and still keeps this Province divided ; 
the papacy not being powerful enough to occupy Italy, 
and having allowed no one else to occupy it, it has resulted 
that she has never been able to reduce herself under one 
head, but has been divided among many princes and 
masters ; the source of so much discord and weakness, 
that she has come to be the prey not only of the power- 
ful barbarians, but of whoever chooses to attack her ; 
and this is an obligation that we Italians owe to the 
Church, and to her alone." 

Machiavel. 



SAVONAROLA CAMPANELLA. 159 

To take Itcdy away from her chimera, Dante would 
throw her into the arms of the emperor. Machiavel 
makes a league of all the barbarian vices and vir- 
tues, in order to rouse her from her sleep. But her 
lot is cast, and Italy goes on ; she gets farther and 
farther on in the dream of the universal papacy ; 
she is no longer Italian ; she becomes cosmopolite, 
in order to give herself up more entirely. 

And when all this is consummated, towards the 
end of the fifteenth century, we must listen to the 
language of the new generations of writers who 
speak in the name of the Church. Instead of the 
triumph she expected to share with the papacy, 
Italy finds herself a prisoner of war. What do the 
most generous of her writers, the Savonarolas and 
Campanellas, those who wish sincerely to see her 
liberated, say to her then ? Do you know what new 
remedy they propose for so many evils, in the name 
of the Church who has cursed them? There is 
nothing more incredible and more logical. Savona- 
rola, the evangelical tribune, sees no other remedy 
but to suffer more yet. Let Italy hope for nothing 
from the earth or from herself! Let her allow her- 
self to be beaten, and crucified by all nations ; let 
her take for her coat of arms the bloody crucifix ! 
let her die voluntarily and go down into the sepul- 
chre like Lazarus, unforbidden. Such, then, is this 
Church policy. 

To console Italy in her misery they advise her to 
be more miserable ! Well ! Italy follows this 



160 CHIABRERA— FILICAJA. 

counsel of her Church ; during a century and a. 
half she is precisely the inert martyr that Savonarola 
demands. She enters into the sepulchre as much 
as a nation can enter. She lets herself be struck by 
all those who come to visit her. The seventeenth 
century arrives ; let us see, after so passive an obe- 
dience, what the new writers, who take their inspi- 
ration from the Church of the Renaissance, will say 
to her. 

Chiabrera, Filicaja, those true poets, are in ac- 
cordance w T ith the Holy See. They have steeped 
their poetry in the ferment of the religious re-action. 
What word of life will they pronounce ? At least 
they will think, doubtless, that the measure of ills 
is full, and that it is time to think of making their 
nation share in the Renaissance of the Church : not 
at all. 

The martyr-policy of Savonarola is a time of glad- 
ness, in comparison with these promises of Chiabre- 
ra and Filicaja. Read again these confidants of 
the new Italian Church ; the same word recurs per- 
petually for Italy : it is that she must complete her 
death. u Suffer, miserable, suffer /" exclaims the 
Filicaja: u he a slave or die ! reflect and choose /" 
Not a word more from these prophets of death. 

Still, there is at least in these words, an echo of 
the biblical wrath, the noise of a body that is cast 
into the tomb. This vigor of contempt conceals 
perhaps a remainder of national life. But when at 
a later period, this sort of funeral of a people, ac- 



MANZ0NI PELLICO. 161 

companied by the chants of the dead, without a 
single chant of regeneration coming from the Church, 
reaches our own days, what do we see '? The king- 
dom of Italy, raised up for a moment by Napoleon, 
falls again ; and the writers, inspired by the Church 
of Rome, Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, resign themselves 
without even uttering a complaint ; the pain they 
feel at the disappearance of Italy has no longer the 
lively exaltation of Savonarola ; for them, all has 
been consummated, centuries since. 

Here, then, is the sum of the history. A social 
contract is formed between the Roman Church and 
Italy. The first promises the second, the universal 
supremacy of the spirit in compensation for ruin. 
Italy accepts ; the ruin is consummated ; the end is 
not attained. There is one great people the less in 
the world ; and the Papacy, faithless to its promise, 
seats itself unrepentant, upon the great dead, stretch- 
ed out from the Alps to Calabria. 

It is impossible for us to witness such a spectacle 
without drawing from it some instruction, at least, 
for ourselves. All this arises from one general 
cause, namely, from a fund of contempt which the 
Roman Church nourishes and entertains for nation- 
alities. She has witnessed for ages without a com- 
plaint the dissolution of Italy : in one day, she has, 
with the same impassibility, seen Poland fall. 
Perhaps a cry, coming from the Vatican, might have 
saved her ; but it never occurred to her to utter this 
cry which would have startled the world. Far from 



162 CONTEMPT FOR NATIONALITIES. 

anticipating, the least in the world, the awakening 
of Greece, M. de Maistre has dared to repeat that 
perhaps the greatest evil that could happen to her 
would be to escape from servitude. An impassibility 
so extraordinary as this, springs from a general 
principle. 

How often, even in France, one hears words 
which amount to this : the State, France, one's 
country, — these are precarious and transient things, 
compared with us, the ecclesiastical power, who, as 
such, are eternal. They grow proud upon their 
eternity, they leave by favor to native land, fleeting 
time ; they measure its days, its hours ; they reserve 
for themselves the ages of ages ; and it is easy to 
see that in such a division, they resign themselves in 
advance, to survive without too much grief, this 
country, this France, these ephemeral nations that 
they contemplate from the height of their immu- 
tability. 

To despise nationalities is nothing else than to 
despise life in its deepest source. Whence come 
these original forms that nations receive from their 
cradle ? They are as the seal of the Creator. Who 
has seen them come into being? Who told you 
that these marks are less sacred than the seal of the 
Vatican ? Who has touched the divine mould in 
wdiich are cast the races of men ? The nationality of 
a people is for it, what his conscience is for a man. 
When the Church leaned, not on theories, but on 
the ever-living himself, did she think to withdraw 



NATIONALITY OF FRANCE. 163 

herself from the bosom of peoples, which are the 
true vessels of the Eternal ? The Hebrew prophets 
threatened Jerusalem ; but in her ruin they saw her 
regeneration ; with them, joy followed close upon 
lamentation. 

The nationality of France is the fruit of all the 
generations ; it is the fruit of her language, whose 
roots lose themselves in a night as dark as that of 
which you boast; of each of the acts of Providence 
at each moment of her past, before even she had a 
history ; of that mysterious baptism which each 
people receives on the shore of an unknow r n Jordan, 
on entering into life ; of her combats, her defeats, 
her victories, for a cause, of which she has received 
the germ, and which grows with her growth. 

The patient work of God, France existed before 
you were what you are ! Without troubling yourself 
any more about what you will do when she is no 
more, take care that she does not survive you! 

For, if the Church separates herself from the 
conscience of living societies, it is inevitable that 
these societies should, in the same proportion, sepa- 
rate themselves from her. The social ideal that the 
Roman Church offers to the nations of the South, is 
a vast cosmopolitanism, in which all national per- 
sonality is to be dissolved. Italy, the fruit of the 
nations of Roman race, has fallen into the snare ; 
she has embraced this cosmopolitanism, thinking that 
all the world was going to follow her ; but the na- 
tions, on the contrary, persisting in preserving, as a 



164 TRUE IDEAL OF SACRED POLICY. 

gift of God, their proper life, it has resulted that 
she has been stifled by those inviolable persons called 
nations. Let us not imitate this example of a people 
of our race ; we should infallibly meet with the same 
fate. 

The true ideal of sacred policy (and it was in this 
that modern Rome misunderstood it) is not to sacri- 
fice nationality to humanity, but to reconcile both, 
in developing one by the other. There are persons 
enough who, obeying unwittingly the genius of the 
Roman Church, proclaim among us an abstract cos- 
mopolitanism ; it is time to vindicate again the laws 
of life. To serve the cause of humanity is not for a 
nation to consent voluntarily to attenuate itself before 
all the rest, since if each realized this ideal, it would 
follow that, life decreasing everywhere at once, hu- 
manity would come to end in a veritable nothingness. 

To conduce to the real humanity of the human 
race, is, on the contrary, for each people to display 
itself according to its own genius, to act for all by 
living w^ith all its life. Any nation whatever which 
retires from the melee, from the dangers of existence 
— which does not occupy in the moral and social 
world, the place that God has assigned to it — which 
does not perform its whole task — such a nation sins 
not only against itself, but against the human race ; 
not only against the past, but against the future. It 
obligates itself beforehand to purchase these moments 
of inertness by future treasures of courage and life. 

While they talk to us of this abstract humanity, 



THE LEAVEN OF NATIONALITY- 165 

the danger of which, as well as the life of it, for all 
peoples of Roman origin, is at Rome, do you not see, 
on the contrary, everywhere bursting forth, powerful 
and bold nationalities, based upon national churches, 
— Prussia, Germany, England, the whole Sclavonic 
race, led by the Sclavonic Pope, the Emperor! 
We have only to cross our frontiers to perceive what 
constitutes the leaven of nationality ; each of these 
nations carries its church with it. 

As for Spain, would you know how she has pre- 
served her nationality ? If she has not been led to 
submit herself, like Italy, she owes it to a horrible 
cause. Will it be believed that it is the Inquisition 
which has preserved the national spirit in her case % 
Nothing is more certain. By making himself more 
Catholic than Rome, the King of Spain has remained 
as it were, to the people, the source of their church ; 
they were too much occupied in thinking what they 
had to fear from the King, to think of the Pope. 
For three centuries, a national scaffold has preserved, 
in spite of ultra-montanism, the nationality of Spain. 

Let us not abandon ourselves, then, to the ener- 
vating fascination of that false ideal, which, from the 
height of the Vatican, hovers over the whole Roman 
race ; it is enough that one great people should have 
perished, in expectation of the fulfilment of a lying 
promise that everything has contradicted. The ex- 
perience consummated, the sacrifice will not be 
renewed. 

The political theory of Rome consists in confining 



166 CHURCH OF FRANCE IN FRANCE. 

the focus of social and divine life to a single point — 
the Vatican, whence it communicates itself to the 
rest of the world ; while, on the contrary, we feel 
more and more distinctly 5 that this focus is in the 
heart of every people and race of men. This is 
why, when any nationality is oppressed, there 
escapes from France a cry of pain, as if she felt her- 
self wounded in a living part of the universal church : 
for the Church of France is not wholly shut up in 
the Vatican. The Pope of M. de Maistre may keep 
us in communion with the Latins, but this is not 
enough ; we wish to be in communion with the 
human race* 

You clear the frontiers in all haste ; already the 
Alps are left behind ; you seek your altar farther on ; 
finally you enter an enclosure on the shores of the 
Tiber. You stop and say, here is the Church of 
France ! You deceive yourselves. The Church of 
France is in France. 

One understands how, in the Middle Ages, when 
the conscience of the nations was not yet formed, 
there should be found an external spiritual power, 
which, over the ruins of Rome, should have taught 
the world, in every circumstance, what it w r as neces- 
sary to love and what to hate. At this day, France 
bears within herself her spiritual direction, her living 
Papacy; her Church is no longer under tutelage. 
To accomplish facts of a universal order, she does 
not wait till the order reaches her from the Vatican ; 
she takes counsel directly of Providence, manifested 



NAPOLEON AND THE PAPACY. 167 

in the universal conscience of the human race ; she 
has herself pronounced, when it became necessary, 
her " God wills it!" Upon this principle, her na- 
tionality, her proper life, is now sacred to us. Na- 
tions are no longer the mute disciples of the spiritual 
power; this power has passed into them ; inviolable, 
it has communicated to them its inviolability. 

These ideas receive a singular confirmation, if you 
consider the part of the Church in the midst of the 
events which changed the face of the world, at the 
commencement of the present century. The rela- 
tions between Napoleon and the Papacy contain an 
inexhaustible fund of instruction in regard to this. 

Under the Consulate, when he is the manifest 
organ of universal opinion, he re-establishes the 
Catholic Church in her rights; all the world ap- 
plauds. Afterwards, in proportion as he removes 
himself farther from the new spirit, he tries some- 
thing else ; he wishes to fill up the void in his em- 
pire : and for this purpose what does he do ? He 
carries off the Pope from Rome, as formerly they 
did a divinity of stone or bronze ; he leads him to 
the centre of his power — that is, he attempts to do 
for Catholicism what Henry VIII. did for Protestant- 
ism. The more violence the Emperor uses to bring 
this power over to his side, and envelope it in the 
lay state, the more he shows the importance he 
attaches to it. If he had succeeded in this seizure 
of the Papacy, what would have happened 1 France 
would have finished by representing Catholicism in 



168 THE CHURCH ESPOUSES HERESY. 

the world. That would have been the banner by 
which the world would have recognized her. 

But the religion which she had embraced was 
more vast ; and so this alliance, which was to have 
been indissoluble, breaks off by the very nature of 
things. The Emperor has Councils which last a 
day ; they sign concordats which are broken on the 
morrow. The impossibility appears on all sides : 
Rome and France both shudder at the hand which 
endeavors to confound them. The first hurls the 
anathema, the second detaches herself; and Napo- 
leon understands at St. Helena, that the Church — 
the spiritual power that he sought for on the other 
side of the mountains — was all living, near to him, 
in the conscience of the nations. 

Thus we see a thing which reverses all hitherto 
received ideas of the Holy See. As soon as Napo- 
leon totters, the Pope passes to the side of the con- 
querors ! But who are they, these conquerors ? 
Heretics and schismatics — Prussia, England, Russia. 
Thus the Roman Church espouses heresy, and, in 
order that all possible contradictions might be assem- 
bled together, this amalgamation, which would have 
made the Popes of the Middle Age recoil with hor- 
ror, calls itself the Holy Alliance. 

Incredible thing, it is the schismatics, the Empe- 
ror of Russia, the King of Prussia, the Ministers of 
England, who exalt the Papacy. We discover, 
then, an astonishing fact. For the first time in the 
Christian world, the immense questions by which 



HER PART IN THE CONGRESSES. 169 

the whole earth is agitated, have passed, so to 
speak, over the head of the Papacy. The schisma- 
tic states treat the Church no longer as a living and 
threatening being to them, but as a being of abstrac- 
tion, which enters into the calculations of diplomacy. 
One perceives that the earth has been shaken for 
half a century, and that the Papacy has ceased to be 
the centre and end of this universal movement. It 
appears no more, in the midst of this great disorder 
of modern affairs, but as a party, a sect of Chris- 
tianity. 

In the Congresses of Vienna and Verona, where 
the fate of the world is discussed, what is her part ? 
She assists by her legates, but another presides over 
them. I ask myself how the representative of the 
Gregory Sevenths and the Innocent Thirds, could 
see himself without despair, confounded and lost 
among the Charges-d'AfTaires, the Plenipotentiaries 
of Heresy. In these assemblies, which are to decide 
the condition of the human race, what people does 
the Papacy save and protect % In the midst of these 
solemn debates, for whom does she speak, when all 
the earth is listening ? She only concerns herself 
about her material possessions ! 

Does she remind us of the mission she filled in 
the Middle Age, by pleading for the weak ? Does 
she think of Ireland, Greece, Bohemia, Hungary, of 
all that are oppressed, at a time when a word let fall 
upon the table of the plenipotentiaries of Vienna 
might change everything 1 Do not ask this of her ; 
8 



170 PLEADS ONLY FOR HERSELF. 

her view is fixed upon a mere point of the earth's 
surface : she is thinking of Romagna. But at least, 
does she not plead for those whom it is impossible to 
forget, for the vanquished ? On the contrary, she 
sees Catholic France prostrated, and she immediately 
asks of the heretical powers to profit by the oppor- 
tunity to tear away a province from France, and 
give it to her !* 

It is the schismatics who prevent this murder ! 
That is, she sees, like the Samaritan, one covered 
with wounds by the roadside, and not only does not 
aid and console him, but she has but one idea, which 
is, to despoil him. 

Did any one ever hear it said, that in the midst 
of the avidity of these victorious princes, the prince 
of the Church had given a direction to the debates 
by one of those great effusions of universal charity 
which would have restored to him in a moment his 
moral authority ? 

Does he profit by the exaltation of their minds, by 
the magnanimity that naturally follows victory, to 
remind the princes of their oaths to their peoples 1 
This was assuredly his task. The prince of the 
schism, the Emperor Alexander, has, they say, shown 
some of these glimmerings of greatness. They say 
nothing of the kind of Rome. 

When it is a question of reconstructing the law 

* Les Quatre Concordats, vol. iii., p. 93., by M. de Pradt, 
formerly Archbishop of Malines. 



WHAT SHE MIGHT HAVE DONE. 171 

of nations, is it Rome who proposes the abolition 
of slavery, and of the punishment of death for politi- 
cal causes? These questions are agitated in the 
universal conscience ; but the Universal Church 
thinks not of them. At least the cry of blood restores 
her to her mission ? When the political scaffolds 
are preparing in the midst of transient and perish- 
able passions, does Rome raise her voice in the 
name of eternal clemency ? Does she place herself 
between the scaffold and the world, which is too much 
irritated to be impartial ? Do Ney, Murat, all those 
brave men pursued by the wrath of the times, do 
they find a refuge in Rome ? By stretching out her 
hand over them, does she save their judges them- 
selves from an eternal regret? No, a thousand 
times no: in the midst of all this, Rome sees but 
Rome. France can never forget it. 

Ah ! those are circumstances that do not occur 
twice, and by which are judged, in the last resort, 
the great powers, as well of the Church as the 
world. The earth yet moist with the blood of battle- 
fields, the nations panting on coming out of the 
strife, France in despair, the victors astounded, Na- 
poleon alone and pensive in his Isle, the Universe 
in one attitude of expectation, and amid all this 
mixture of desolation and pride, the papacy, that 
power of heaven, blessing from on high the city and 
the world, occupied above all with those who are 
suffering, closing the wounds of the bleeding nations, 
claimed for them their wages at the close of so terri- 



172 NEGLECTED OPPORTUNITIES. 

ble a day, remembering that France is the eldest 
daughter of the Church, calling her out of the sepul- 
chre, warming her with her sacred breath, on the 
morrow of Waterloo, but above all pleading day and 
night for him, whom, in a moment of wrath, she 
had cursed, the great prisoner of Saint Helena, leav- 
ing not an hour of sleep to kings till they had put 
an end to that iniquitous torture, and breaking at 
last, in the name of Christian power, the bonds of 
Longwood which all the princes of the earth had 
forged ; what a mission if it had suggested itself 
to her ! what a spectacle ! and it was thus the Popes 
had formerly done for King Richard ! What a mani- 
festation, what a brilliant revelation of the spiritual 
authority! Where is the man who would not have 
been struck, moved even to the bottom of his heart, 
at the sight of this Prometheus delivered from the 
vulture by the Christian Hercules? I know of no 
one, for my part, so blind as not to have bent the 
knee. 

But these divine opportunities once neglected, 
they return no more ! Then what remains to be 
done ? It is necessary to try and regain by subter- 
ranean ways, the world that they did not know 
enough to regain possession of by the lightnings of 
the spirit, and amidst the acclamations of the uni- 
verse. It is necessary to make use of artifices, to 
speak a double language, in short, to do precisely 
what they are doing to-day. 

Moreover, since the Papacy has renounced in a 



POLITICAL ASSEMBLIES. 173 

solemn moment, what may well be called the spiri- 
tual government of the human race, that is a heritage 
that cannot remain vacant. It is absolutely neces- 
sary, on the dismemberment of the spiritual power, 
that there should be formed an authority whose 
effects should make themselves felt by all nations. 
The Christian world is accustomed to be ruled by 
the public voice ; it cannot altogether dispense with 
this invisible conductor. 

The first assemblies of the French Revolution 
evidently had this thought. What is the Declara- 
tion of the rights of man by the Constituent Assembly, 
if it is not a canonical profession of faith, manifested 
in the name of France, not only for one country in 
particular, but for the entire earth ? Did a speech 
of Mirabeau, then, have much less efficacy in the 
world than a bull? The peoples among whom 
speech is truly emancipated are made to serve as 
organs for all, and to plead each for the other. 

Our political assemblies will never reach the height 
at which they ought to aim, until they are conscious 
of being an organ of the new spiritual power. Till 
then we shall have brilliant orators ; they will often 
enchant the ear; but somehow their able speech 
will have lost its way to the soul ; it will not reach 
the depths of men's spirits ; we shall be astonished 
to find, after so much speaking, that the nations 
retain not a syllable of it. 

When these powers shall disappear in the deca- 
dence of the West, when it shall come to pass, one 



174 SPEECH OF CHRISTIAN NATIONS. 

day, that no one will make a private game of public 
speaking, when no one, in a serious moment, will 
ascend the rostrum without experiencing an inward 
tremor, as if he had the whole earth for his auditory — 
and he will have it in reality — then, speech will 
again become true and living ; it will rule the world 
as it ruled it in the Middle Age. Fictitious formu- 
las will give place to spontaneous accents. Anathe- 
mas, coming from the public conscience, will resound 
from people to people ; they will strike, as formerly 
did the bulls of the Vatican, at violence and cun- 
ning. Either the speech of Christian nations is but 
a useless sound or it must end by being all this. 

The object is not to overthrow the Catholic city, 
but to realize it. 

You attend interminable debates upon public edu- 
cation. The discussions are learned, eloquent ; 
everybody understands that it is a vital point which 
is in question ; they dispute in advance the genera- 
tions which are not. How is it, after so much able 
speaking, that no one has said that the true educa- 
tion of a country of free discussion is the permanent 
spectacle of its policy, that all the influences of 
schools give place to this, and that it is sovereignly 
useless to hope anything from an obscure modifica- 
tion of instruction, if, in the first place, you do not 
ameliorate, reform, and correct that all-powerful, 
irresistible instruction, which speaks and breaks 
forth every day in facts, and at the political tribune ? 
How can we here cause the life of Christianity to 



TWO SPIRITUAL POWERS. 175 

penetrate literature and philosophy, if this high 
thought does not appear elsewhere — there, where it 
might shine in the reality of the law, for France and 
the world ? How can we teach here that the whole 
moral dignity of man is in his thought, if the public 
powers, on the contrary, recognize only wealth 1 

We say this, in our narrow circle, because we 
think it. We are believed while we are speaking ; 
but soon taken hold of by the lie that the teachings 
of political life so strikingly give us, how many are 
there with hearts stout enough to remain faithful to 
the truth, of which they here are conscious % Must 
there be one doctrine for the sons and another for 
the fathers % How long has the life of a people been 
thus divided? The future will put an end to these 
contradictions. 

If our doctrines are the true ones for science, 
law, letters, philosophy, they must also be true for 
politics, considered in a general manner. 

I have established that there exist at the present 
day, two spiritual powers : the one, real, which is 
in the conscience of peoples ; the other apparent, 
which shows itself in the Vatican. Whenever the 
first is silent, from whatever reason, the other profits 
by it, to reappear and threaten to invade everything. 

Would you, then, sincerely resist the domination 
of the Roman Papacy ? I do not propose to you to 
repeat what Napoleon did — to carry off the material 
person of the Papacy. I propose to you only to 
remain faithful to our tradition, to take away from 



176 HOW TO CONQUER. 

modern Rome the spirit which, in her holy epochs, 
made her greatness and universality. 

It is not a man that must be carried away — it is a 
spirit ; and I have shown that since the last century 
it has passed over to our side. 

You fear the Pope ; there is a way of dispos- 
sessing without insulting him, as our kings of the 
Middle Ages did. Be, in the conduct of the world, 
more Christian, more universal than he ; have that 
charity for nationalities that he has not had. Try 
to raise up, one day, the dead that he has made ! 
Open the gates of the city of life, no longer only to 
a small number of the predestinated. Spain has 
been the right arm of Rome ; be you the right arm 
of humanity. In a word, attempt a policy more 
elevated, more holy, more divine than that of the 
Pope ; you will then inherit his power, and you will 
fear him no more. It is the sure way to conquer 
without fighting him. 



IX. 

THE ROMAN CHURCH AND THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH. 

Under Urban VIII., an Italian poet, Pallavicini, 
hits upon a singularly bold idea. In a caprice of 
poesy, he imagines that the Christ in the high 
heavens repents of his alliance with the Roman 
Church. St. Paul descends upon earth to repudiate 
her. After the celestial divorce, other Churches 
take the veil of the betrothed ; but they are all 
repulsed one after the other. Rather than espouse 
any particular church, the Christ prefers to remain 
in eternal widowhood. 

The author of this apocalyptic work lived in safety 
at Venice, under the protection of the Republic. 
One of his friends, a poet, persuades him to take a 
journey in his company towards France. They set 
out. At the frontiers they turn aside to see Avig- 
non, the city of the Popes. Hardly have they 
entered the city, when the friend quits his part. He 
was an agent of the Roman Inquisition. Pallavicini 
is cast into prison, and beheaded in 1644. 

This story explains why Christianity disappears 
almost entirely from w^orks of the imagination, in 
Italy, in the two last centuries. The most sincere 
8* 



178 MYTHOLOGICAL VERSES. 

believer must always fear, but lie should not appear 
enough so in a work of fancy. 

I observe with astonishment that in the modern 
epoch, the Roman Church has lost, in literature, with 
the ideal of Christianity, the sentiment of its own 
proper poesy. The Cardinals and Popes w T rite a 
quantity of verses ; but this frivolous distraction has 
nothing in common with the solemn inspirations of 
the Middle Age. Where are the accents of flame of 
the St. Ambroses, and the St. Paulins, which were 
added to the liturgy? Urban VIII. writes pagan 
verses to the Cavalier Berni. Instead of the Stabat 
Mater j and the Salutaris Hostia, the princes of the 
Church compose mythological sonnets, at the time 
when Luther is thundering the Te Beum of the Re- 
formation : Our God is a fortress, ein fest Burg ist 
unser Gott. 

At Rome, they consider Christianity as exhausted 
by Dante and Tasso ; thence comes the almost offi- 
cial reign of the mythology of Marini, the author of 
Adonis, the poet of the Holy See, of Urban VIII., of 
Alexander VII., of Gregory XV., of Cardinal Ludo- 
visio. Misunderstanding at once the nature of the 
Gospel and that of poetry, they come to the conclu- 
sion that the one has nothing in common with the 
other. They give their imagination to Paganism, 
their faith to Christianity ; that is to say, they destroy 
the unity of the inward life. 

It is the heretics, Milton in Paradise Lost, Voltaire 
in Zaire, Klopstock in the Messiah, who restore to 



A NEW FUTURE. 179 



poetry the Christian sentiment. And when, at the 
commencement of this century, M. de Chateaubriand 
completes the overthrow of the Pagan ideal, and 
restores Christianity to the possession of man, entire, 
spirit, heart, and imagination, what do they then 1 
Oh, instruction more shining than the light ! They 
place the interdict upon the author of the Genius 
of Christianity. 

In the old age of Louis XIV., we saw the discus- 
sions of Jansenism and Molinism absorb by degrees 
the attention of France. This was at first an object 
of astonishment to some wits ; they could not com- 
prehend how men paid the attention to such matters 
which w r as no longer accorded to the little revolutions 
in the favors and the spirit of the court, nor to the 
changes of ministers. France persisted, because in 
these religious debates w T as shut up the germ of the 
eighteenth century; under the Jansenists and the 
Molinists appeared vaguely the first indications of 
the change which was about to break out in the 
minds and in affairs. So in the present day, under 
this ferment of religious discussions which again gain 
possession of the world, I say that there is moving 
a new future, a new order of things, and that it 
belongs to all men of good will to labor to prepare 
for its advent. 

Those who have been most surprised at this inter- 
ruption of religious questions, are they who make an 
exclusive profession of political life. When we 
pointed out these new symptoms, many exclaimed 



180 



ENNUI. 



that we were resisting a phantom ; when all Europe 
has become involved in it, it has become necessary 
co give up to the evidence. 

They firmly believe the entire universe for ever 
absorbed in spectacle of little contests of individuals 
and rivalries of the tribune ; rather than abandon one's 
self longer to such mean questions it is a progress 
simply to turn to something different. 

For it must not be believed that all is false or 
vicious in the efforts of those who make war upon 
us. After the events of this age, the Revolution, 
Napoleon, an immense ennui is about to seize upon 
the human mind as soon as it is unoccupied. God 
has accustomed it to terrible shocks ; it can no more 
come under the yoke of little thoughts. Enlarged 
by the education it has received from facts, it has 
need of great objects, even to divert itself. Now, 
teach me where is the moral life at the present day ? 
Who developes it? Who attaches himself to it, 
or rather who is there that does not labor to stifle it? 
One would say that was to-day the word of com- 
mand, which, come down from on high, rules all 
this society. 

Such a situation could not escape the intelligence 
of the men who think to have the privilege of reli- 
gious affairs : they have seen the human soul aban- 
doned, unoccupied, given up, and they have said to 
themselves : 'tis well ! we will seize hold of it 
again. 

A still stronger reason than that which I have 



INSTINCT OF IMMORTALITY. 181 

hitherto indicated was added to all the rest. It 
appears to have been believed that, thanks to the 
marvels of industry accumulated day by day, and 
the luxuries with which the earth has been spread, 
the human soul would be seduced into forgetting its 
immortality. Well, in spite of all these enchant- 
ments of a world enriched by human art, this instinct 
of immortal life protests ; it awakens as with a start. 
Man seeks for his bond of connection not only with 
living humanity, but with the eternal city; amid the 
prodigies of the age, he had forgotten that he must 
die ! He recollects it, and he seeks in death for the 
living communion with all spirits. Here is some- 
thing serious at the foundation of the religious move- 
ment of the times ; whatever may be said of it, it 
disturbs the nations. 

The proletaries themselves feel that it is in vain 
for you to cover them with silver and gold ; there is 
yet something wanting. Their soul is very often 
greater than that of kings, they know ; it would not 
suffice them to bear the crown here ; they wish also 
to reign in the eternal life. 

What is the instinct of immortality but a moral 
life, which, accumulated in the present, encroaches 
upon the future ? 

Do not expect, by any political satisfaction or 
social combination, to deceive this sentiment; it 
carries with itself its own demonstration ; it is the 
axiom of a superior science. Stifle it to-day, it will 
be born again to-morrow. Neither cunning nor 



182 PHILOSOPHY MUST SPEAK. 

habit constitute alone the power of the Roman 
Church. Its power is that invincible allurement of 
immortality, the ever-springing source of eternal 
religion. The Church seems, alone in the midst of 
the civil world, to have preserved the ancient for- 
mula for calling the soul out of the sepulchre. The 
whole force of the ultra-montane reaction lies there. 

Many minds arrive on this side, attracted by an 
unextinguishable thirst after life ; but they who, 
possessing this allurement, instead of life transmit 
only death, have received their name from St. Paul ; 
he calls them stealers of men. 

If philosophy, in keeping silence on these ques- 
tions, has thought, that meanwhile the human mind 
would forget them, she has deceived herself: her 
timidity has availed her nothing. She is bound in 
honor, then, to enter upon a new epoch, without 
which the nations will soon be farther advanced 
than the doctors. It is true that this question does 
not resolve itself solely by books : it is by an in- 
ward impulse that immortality reveals itself. Would 
you not only believe but feel it, fill your mind with 
great thoughts, with noble projects : and you will 
have the anticipated consciousness of the life to 
come ; you will possess it in advance. On the con- 
trary, give yourself up to small passions, to narrow 
interests ; you will turn over in vain all the official 
demonstrations and accept all the catechisms ; you 
may with your lips promise yourself immortality ; 
but in this extenuated moral life that you will have 



THE CHURCH SUSPECTS THE NATIONS. 183 

made for yourself the present^ consciousness of the 
future life will always be wanting to you. What 
good is eternity, when the soul, such as you have 
made it, does not even fill up time ? 

Worst of all would be the hope to conquer a reli- 
gious, philosophical, and political system with cun- 
ning. Others will always be our masters in this 
war. We ought not to succeed but when we oppose 
to our adversaries, whoever they may be, an idea 
more elevated, a Christianity more universal, a 
society more equitable, an immortality more entire. 
It is not enough to deny questions to make them 
pisappear : that is the spirit of the past ; we must 
establish a superior order to that which is opposed 
to us : this is the spirit that we think we see spring- 
ing up. 

I have said that the Roman Church misunderstood 
nationalities ; it must be added that she suspects 
them. Observe what is passing in Catholic Europe ; 
you will soon discover this considerable fact, that 
the Church everywhere holds the nations in suspi- 
cion, that she aspires to separate herself from them, 
and to rely only upon Rome. One has no need of 
distinct avowals to know, that in France, the Galil- 
ean Church exists but in name. 

In Spain even, when the clergy was hitherto so 
completely incorporated in the nation, all the voices 
which make themselves heard, repeat in their turn, 
the same cry : Rome. The Bishop of the Canaries, 
in the w r ork he has just published, places the new 



184 THE WORST OF ANARCHIES. 

independence of the Spanish Church in absolute ser- 
vitude as regards Rome. This man of true merit, 
incapable of putting on a mask of liberty, lets out 
the secret of the ecclesiastical coalition, when he 
pronounces a word that they take good care not to 
repeat here. " No one is ignorant," says he, " that 
the French Revolution is an invention of hell."* 
In Germany, Gaarres, in the name of the clergy of 
Bavaria, echoes the Bishop of the Canaries. 

It may be said, that wdiile I am speaking, all the 
Catholic clergy of the south and of the north of 
Europe, are despoiling with violence the national 
characters which had been their safeguard in time 
past, and that they are concentrating themselves in 
Rome in order to attack in concert the spirit of each 
one of their peoples in particular, and the spiritual 
unity of the nineteenth century in general. 

This disorder does not date from to-day ; in the 
two last centuries the Pope has fallen out with all 
the States of his communion. Is this the unity they 
accuse the French Revolution of having broken ? 
This unity was but the worst of anarchies. 

The weakest princes have guarantied the spirit 
of modern society. Is it seriously expected that the 

* It is singular, that in this anathema against the 
French Revolution, the Bishop of the Canaries attempts to 
supports himself upon the sentiment of M. de Tocque- 
ville, author of Democracy in America. — Vide Independencia 
constante de la Iglesia Hispana, 1843, p. 356, by Don Judas. 
Jose Homo, Bishop of the Canaries. 



sixtus v. 185 



peoples will give up to-day what the kings knew 
enough to defend yesterday 1 Can it be believed? 

In separating itself from the nationalities, the 
clergy does not see that it separates itself from its 
own principle of life. For during two centuries, it 
has followed the nations, and not preceded them. 
In the eighteenth century, when society w T as a rea- 
soner, the clergy was so too, with the Cardinal Du- 
bois ; the world, after great shocks, returns to its 
God ; the clergy immediately follows ; and this life 
that it has derived from the heart of the peoples, it 
attempts immediately to communicate to Rome : so 
that it is society wdiich restores life to the Church, 
and no longer the Church to society. 

Rome is very little like what the ecclesiastical 
writers on this side of the mountains imagine ; if 
they should one day succeed in taking their inspira- 
tion only from the soul of the Vatican, they would 
be astonished to find how hostile that cold soul is to 
any sound. There is in the world a government 
personified by Sixtus V. : to obtain power, this man 
of iron exhausts himself w T ith feigning that he is 
dying ; for seven years he plays the agony, and ap- 
pears about to expire at every breath ; for, said he, 
they make popes of dying men : eke si fanno papa 
i moribondi. If the Churches were face to face a 
single day, entirely alone, without the nations, with 
a power which makes for itself a law of death, w 7 ould 
they not regret, before evening, the sun and the 
source of the living ! 



186 THE CHURCH ISOLATED. 

In this dust which they attempt to establish be- 
tween the Church and the nations, if Rome has not 
the nationalities for her, has she humanity en her 
side ? The dissenters will re-unite, say you. What 
guaranty have I of it ? What ! without your taking 
a single step, without your rising to a higher eleva- 
tion, the half of Christendom which has abandoned 
you is to think better of it ; and without any action 
on your part, you are to consummate in your old age 
what was impossible for you in the fervor of youth ! 
But where are the indications of a thing so extraor- 
dinary ? Where are these dissenting peoples who 
are turning back again % I see them, on the con- 
trary, marching headlong towards the future ; whence 
I conclude, that the supreme reconciliation must be 
sought for elsewhere than in you ; and all that I can 
say is, that I fear that in this immutability you will 
remain isolated from the nationalities, and from hu- 
manity, at once. 

In this situation of the world, some w T riters of the 
North, and of Germany in particular, have been 
unable to repress a cry of joy at seeing what they 
call the decadence of the peoples of the Roman race, 
dragged down by the decadence of the Roman 
Church. They are too much in a hurry ; this vul- 
ture joy has betrayed them. They have hoped that 
this race of men was about to be effaced under the 
weight of ultra-montanism, and that their own was 
to inherit from it. 

By this un-Christian, unphilosophic joy, they have 



CHRISTIAN NATIONS IMMORTAL. 187 

shown that dejected as France seems, her mis- 
sion has not yet been borrowed by any one. No 
one among us has ever rejoiced at the death of a 
people, still less of a race of men. We have sym- 
pathized with dissenting Greece as much as with 
catholic Ireland ; and the disappearance of a people, 
if it were possible, would seem to us a calamity for 
ourselves. This is why the w T orld knows that 
France, such as she is, can alone pronounce the so- 
cial w r ord, capable of raising up Italy, Spain, Portu- 
gal, Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, all those 
fragments fallen from the crown of the Popes. 

See how much more than Rome we believe in the 
spirit ! While she boasts of surviving every city, it 
is matter of faith among us that every Christian na- 
tion is immortal. Each one of them may swoon 
away for a moment ; but it has in itself the principle 
which prevents it from decaying, even in the sepul- 
chre. 

It is true we do not believe that the way to save 
these peoples is to weigh them down with the bur- 
den of the ancient Church ; w T e believe that a new 
word of life, pronounced by a free nation, is alone 
capable of breaking the seal of the tomb. For if the 
Roman Church has said that she is the incorruptible 
body of Christ, we extend that to "all humanity, re- 
newed by the Spirit ; and we do not admit that a 
single people, a living member of Christ, can remain 
eternally nailed upon the cross and the Golgotha of 
history, without having its day of resurrection. 



188 GREECE RISEN. 



What people ever went deeper into death than the 
Greek people 7 It was not only crucified — it w T as 
sealed in the sepulchre ; another race of men, of 
another religion, watched lest they should take away 
the stone. Rome no longer prayed for this defunct 
nation ! She was abandoned by those who ought to 
pray for all. The travellers — Byron himself — were 
deceived ; they listened, but heard no sound. 

But this law had to be observed, according to 
which one never sees in Christendom, as in Pagan- 
ism, peoples w T ho are once struck down and never 
rise again. Under their ashes the spirit was living, 
one knows not where ! Riga translates the Mar- 
seillaise; with this hymn, the soul of renewed 
France circulates low from valley to valley. It 
extends itself, it grows big ; and at length (a day 
eternally sacred for me) it was given me to arrive, 
in 1829, w T ith the French army, on those shores of 
death, precisely in time to see the miracle consum- 
mated. From the earth came forth, around a bloody 
cross, a new Greece. My hands have touched the 
hands which saved a people ; my eyes have seen, 
under the form of a people, a Lazarus, after three 
centuries of sepulture, at the call of France, issue 
tottering from the Corinth and the Athens of Saint 
Paul. 

This resurrection was accomplished upon a schis- 
matic people, that all the world might see that Rome 
has lost the privilege of doing marvellous things. 
On the other hand, the miracle has been done not 



THE REMEDY FOR ALL. 189 

for Greece alone, but for the instruction and hope of 
all crushed peoples, in whom exists a single spark 
of life. Let them preserve this spark ! There needs 
no more for the God of the moderns to make a world 
revive ! 

In the decadence of many Catholic states, one 
sees every day, it is true, theories spring up for 
raising again one people in particular, * — Ireland on 
one side, Italy on the other. To these enterprises 
there is wanting but one thing; : it is to feel that 
these national miseries are all consolidated together, 
that the remedy for one can only spring from a force 
capable of healing them all. By what contradiction 
do the Catholic writers of Ireland and Italyf advise 
their peoples to seek their proper safety in an iso- 
lated and separate manner? As if, in reducing 
themselves to private interest, they did not disarm 
themselves by this excess of prudence ! As if it was 
not the very contrary of the Catholic ideal ! It is 
certain that no one of them will regain entire posses- 
sion of himself, if he do not make common cause with 
all his brothers by death, if this idea does not 
aggrandize his own undertaking, if he has not at 
once on his side the power of nationality, and the 
power of the universe. The angePs trumpet, capa- 

* Abroad, the Neo-Catholic writers are almost all the 
declared enemies of France. 

f O'Connell has hitherto only made an insular question 
of the Catholicism of Ireland. Vide Balbo, Esperances de 
Vltalie, p. 268. 



190 THE NEW ALLIANCE ITALY. 

ble of awakening Ireland — ought it not to be heard 
with the same sound in all the Catholic ruins, at 
Prague, Warsaw, Florence, Madrid, in Paraguay, 
and even at Rome, in the tomb of Adrian ? Would 
you that a single member of this great universal 
body should be resuscitated, and that any other 
should remain buried? The misfortune is, that the 
Church has let the peoples of her communion become 
strangers to each other ; she has sown the scattered 
members ; she no longer knows how to compose a 
body from them. On waking, at the North and at 
the South, these peoples, divided into shreds, half 
dead, half living, w T ith difficulty recognize each 
other ; the weakness of Rome has kept them divided ; 
the greatness of France should be to re-unite them. 
In order to re-animate this cold city of the dead, the 
first thing to do is to excite in them the sentiment of 
the new alliance in a new spirit ; for the dead bury 
their dead — they do not resuscitate them. 

For no people is the peril so imminent as for 
Italy ; and if the w r ords I am about to pronounce 
are not honied words, I desire that they should be 
received as those of a man w T ho has many times here 
proved his love for that country. How can one 
help being struck at seeing the Italian philosophy 
of the present day falling into the snare of ultra-mon- 
tanism ! Hitherto, under all sorts of forms, it had 
incessantly protested, even in spite of the poets, 
against the destruction of civil society. If the facts 
w r ere overwhelming, at least the right w T as main- 



HER WRITERS AUSTRIAN IDEAS. 191 

tained. There remained to modern Italy one thing 
only, the internal independence of the spirit. Now, 
her writers are conspiring at the present day to take 
away from her this last refuge. With the best faith 
in the world, Rosmini, Gioberti, Troya, Balbo and 
the rest, employ all their talents to destroy by reason 
the empire of reason; overthrowing this internal 
liberty of the human mind, they are unwittingly 
giving their country, as far as in them lies, the 
finishing stroke. 

If they were only original and innovators in this 
servitude ! But no ! this barren w T ay has already 
been trodden. They repeat to satiety, only what 
M. de Maistre at St. Petersburg, M. de Bonald in 
emigration, Gorresat Munich, Gunther and Schle- 
gel at Vienna, have laid down before them. In the 
country of the greatest boldnesses of intelligence, 
they range themselves in the rear-guard of the past. 
Without their knowing it, the burden of Austrian 
ideas weighs upon them ; they employ their forces 
to enchain themselves still. I seem to see men 
whose right arm is bound wdth cords, and who them- 
selves are binding the other from the instinct of sym- 
metry. To deliver herself from the double yoke, 
Italy has need, more than any other people, of the 
explosion of a new spirit ; and yet it is the very 
principle of thought which they are flattering, per- 
suaded that when the spirit is given up into the 
hands of the papacy, it will then have exactly the 
electric force to break the stone of the sepulchre. 



192 TWO KINDS OF SERVITUDE. 

Oh ! illusion of the swoon ! Will there no one 
arise in the great national tradition, to utter a cry to 
pierce the walls of the Alps, and prevent this deli- 
berate suicide ! 

Philosophy a prisoner ! Captivity of the w T ithin 
and the without, of the temporal and the spiritual ! 
double knot of the Empire and of Rome ! What 
word must be pronounced, Italians, to render 
luminous to you in your language what is clearer 
than the day in ours ? If to the chains of the body 
you add voluntarily and scientifically the chains of 
the mind, there can be no longer among you even 
the shadow of a people. 

I will repeat w T hat I have said, for it is well worth 
the trouble. You have to combat two kinds of ser- 
vitude : hitherto you have attempted to turn them 
one against the other ; it is high time to enter into 
anew spirit; without which you run the risk of 
being eternally the dupes of both. Now, there is 
nothing, absolutely nothing new in the renounce- 
ment that you are making of the principle of re- 
search, and of life, at the feet of the papacy, unless 
it be that you thus give the lie to all your greatest 
men, and that in pretending to support yourself upon 
tradition, you commence on the contrary by repudi- 
ating the tradition of your thinkers. You who would 
come to life again and who have so long repre- 
sented the human mind in the first rank, do not 
desert it in the last battle ! 

Resting upon a chimerical alliance with Rome, 



BISOGNA IL FERRO ! 193 

they think all results easy, at the risk of enervating 
hope itself. Italy thus enriches herself with in- 
genious books, in which they recompose almost with- 
out an effort the chart of the globe. In these 
writings, the fruits of excellent intentions, they pro- 
mise to resuscitate a people, almost in a friendly 
way, by the good will of cabinets. They only ask, 
for this purpose, a little assistance on the part of the 
country. But I tell you, on the contrary, that you 
cannot be born again but by a moral prodigy ; and 
if the first axiom of your political science is not to 
shed, at need, in noble combats for the world, not a 
few drops, but whole rivers of your noble blood, it 
were better never to hope or attempt anything. 
Was it by the combinations of Imperial or Papal 
Cabinets, that the States of North America, the 
Spain of 1812, or the Greece of 1827 became free ? 
The world has not changed ; those who make you 
believe that it is easy to be resuscitated without a 
miracle of heroism, deceive themselves. Remember 
that your Machiavel himself extols the fox, only 
on condition that the lion is joined to it. Neither 
heaven nor earth can save you, if you do not redeem 
yourselves, in the future, by a baptism of fire. Put 
no trust in words ! for this wound there is need of 
the steel. Bisogna ilferro! 

Let us bring together, in a word, the whole genius 

of the French Revolution ; try to discover in what 

it is distinguished from those that have preceded it. 

Think you it is merely the overthrow of the nobility? 

9 



194 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 

Others had succeeded in that before. Of absolute 
power? England had already destroyed it. The 
affranchisement of the Tiers-Etat, the accession of 
the people ? That had also been witnessed before. 
What is there, then, that is new in this Revolution ? 
It is this : for the first time in the world, ancient or 
modern, a people emancipates itself from the bonds 
and limits of its Church. It rises above all barriers, 
differences, limitations of its private worship ; it 
ascends directly to the source of law and life. It 
enters into communion with the God of all Churches; 
and in this condition, which commands each and all 
of the clergies of the earth, it does what none had 
ever done before ; it embraces in a universal com- 
munion a new human race. It is this which at the 
first made the earth utter a shout of gladness. A 
people becomes for fifty years the instrument of the 
universal spirit, as all the others before it had been 
the instrument of a particular spirit, sect, or church ! 
That had never before been seen. 

This is the sense in which it is true to say that 
this Revolution, which is enclosed within no limits, 
must make the circuit of the globe. 

Foundation of the French Revolution in its great- 
ness — thought, that binds together its most difficult 
epochs ! Attach yourself to a secondary end, and 
you lose the thread of this history : Constituent 
Assembly, Convention, Directory, Empire — are so 
many phrases that refute one another ; you see but 
one chaos. Follow, on the contrary, this supreme 



POSITION OF FRANCE. 195 

idea of religious universality, and all is explained. 
It is never once interrupted, and these fifty years of 
apparent contradictions form an invincible unity. 

After this people has communicated directly with 
the universal spirit, they propose to it to-day, as a 
last submission, to lay aside these vast thoughts^ to 
quit this summit, whither it has been led by Provi- 
dence, w T here it has conversed face to face with God 
himself, amid the lightnings and thunders, over a 
tottering world. They advise it to return with 
bended head to the fold, that is to say, into a spirit 
of sect, which, far from becoming greater, has become 
narrower now than ever. 

Suppose that France consents to this ! Admit 
that this genius, which was overstepping all bounds, 
restrains itself — that France, repenting of her too 
great glory, should, like Charles the Fifth, go and 
celebrate, while still alive, her funeral ceremonies, 
in a corner of the Vatican. This abdication would 
avail nothing to the spirit of the past. 

The position, superior to the Roman Church, has 
been once taken, and will never more be abandoned. 
On the day when France should quit it, Russia, 
Germany, England, all the world would endeavor to 
take her place ; since they well know that there is 
the throne' of the church of the future. 

Thus, they propose to our country an absolute 
sacrifice, useless to those who ask it, mortal to those 
who consummate it : a true sacrifice of Abraham ; 
for the hand of God is in the cloud, to hold back the 



196 DEMOCRACY OF CHRISTIANITY. 

glaive, if by chance France kneeling, with down- 
cast eyes, consented to receive the blow. 

One word more. In the ideal of the Christian 
Church, everything was done by the people : 
priests, deacons, bishops, became such by election, 
and as it were sprang from the public conscience. 
Now, nothing in the Church is done by the people ; 
they never more interrogate, through them, the 
voice of God. This is what authorizes me to say, 
that the spirit of modern institutions, in replacing 
everything upon this great basis of the public con- 
science, of the sovereignty of the people, is incon- 
testably in its principle nearer the Christian ideal, 
than is at the present day the organization and in- 
stitution of the Church. 

Let us conclude. They were seeking in different 
ways to falsify the tradition of life, which consti- 
tuted all our power ; I was persuaded that a real 
danger was menacing, and that there were great ac- 
complices. Till this moment, I have fought what 
in my soul and conscience I believe to be the good 
fight. My adversaries know me little, if they think 
that any sentiment of private bitterness has mingled 
on my part in this contest. God be thanked, I en- 
tertain no hatred for any in the world, and the mat- 
ters were so great that if 1 have been attacked by 
any corporation whatever, I declare that I have not 
felt it. Besides, I must do my opponents the justice 
to say, that if they have listened to my words, they 
have not thought to interrupt me ; they have under- 



CONCLUSION. 197 



stood, that to introduce violence here would have 
been to ruin themselves ; and, on our part, in order 
to conquer, we have not thought it necessary to hate 
them. 

In fact, 1 have never regarded open hostilities as 
the real peril. There has always seemed to me, to 
be something more dangerous than avowed Jesuit- 
ism or ultra-montanism ; it is that spirit which is its 
precursor, and by which the world is beginning to 
let itself be seized ; to make of religion no longer 
a fanaticism, but an eternal mode, to flatter at once 
the Church and philosophy, liberty and servitude, to 
interchange all the masks, to make the supreme suit- 
ableness to consist in enveloping one's self with am- 
biguous words, to amuse opinion by pretended 
quarrels, to delight in a vain change of persons as 
though it were a reality, to think and talk low; 
there was the danger. In the midst of this inertia, 
reason and good sense are suddenly aroused. Every- 
thing is restored to its proper place. They deny 
the progress of the human mind ; it is obliged to 
take a step, in order to prove it. 

Spirit of greatness and power, Spirit of the future, 
who art not wholly shut up in Rome, but who livest 
also and workest in the heart of all races at this 
moment, who overflowest at this day, like a river 



198 CONCLUSION, 



after the rains of autumn, every known form, every 
particular Church, every symbol old and new, who 
art not the exclusive possession of any person or 
clergy, who dost shine forth in the lay world at least 
as much as in the ecclesiastical world, who wouldst 
have thy Church not merely a chosen tribe, but 
all humanity, teach us then, at last, teach us only no 
more to hate one another. 



THE END. 



GATES & STEDMAN, 
PUBLISHERS AND BOOKSELLERS, 

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Respectfully announce that they will immediately commence the publica- 
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LIVES OF THE PURITANS. 

A series of several volumes, by a gentleman descended from the stock, and 
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GATES & STEDMAN, 

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114 WILLIAM STREET, NEAR JOHN, 

Have just published, in 2 volumes, 12mo, 

NOTES FROM OYER SEA; 

CONSISTING OF 

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BY REV. JOHN MITCHELL. 



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observing and discriminating man : and one too who has the gift of telling us 
what he saw and heard in such a way that we are pleased to follow him from 
place to place, or stop with him when he wants to rest, being sure that wher- 
ever he is he will find something worth mentioning, and that we shall have 
pleasure in listening to his account. We have been gratified more by these 
■ wo volumes than by any recent travels with which we have met. The au- 
thor was formerly pastor of the Edwards Church, Northampton, and the editor 
of the Christian Spectator." — JV*. Y. Observer. 



Notes from Over Sea. 

** A handsome pair of volumes, from a new publishing house at 114 William 
•treet. The author, late pastor of the Edwards Church at Northampton, 
Mass., went abroad for the benefit of his health, having his physician (Dr. L. 
B. Hopkins,) for a travelling companion. They wandered through England, 
Ireland, Scotland, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, &c, 
fcc, and appear to have taken note of whatever may be supposed to interest 
readers in general, and Mr. Mitchell has made a most agreeable report of their 
observations in the volume before us." — Newark Daily Advertiser. 

" Mr. Mitchell is not a book-maker — or in other words, he did not make his 
sojourn in Europe for the purpose of getting up an account of what he saw and 
heard, as is too frequently the case with authors of travels. He visited the 
old world for the benefit of his health, and seeing much that was agreeable — 
much that to him was new, as it cannot fail to be to the great majority of his 
readers, he took occasion to forward his records of such progress to a relative 
at home, — and since his return has formed from them a couple of very agreea- 
ble, as well as instructive volumes, which are now before us. The style of 
the author is easy — in some cases, perhaps, careless — but still exhibiting 
throughout an air of honesty, which perhaps is never more highly prized than 
when hearing the pleasing, and in some cases, the wonderful stories of so- 
journers in foreign lands." — Auburn Journal. 

" We have run over these pages very cursorily, and have found ourselves 
more interested in them than we anticipated. We took up the book, with the 
feeling that here was another added to the many books already published of 
travels in Europe, and that it could present no new views of the systems of 
the old world, or contrasts between them and the new. But we confess, that 
as we glanced along, we became more and more convinced of the remark of 
the author in the preface that ' Every intelligent American going thither has 
his own opportunities and habits of observation ; and if he tells us many 
things which we know already, he can hardly fail to tell us some things which 
we did not know. 5 The book will be found to be one of much interest, pleas- 
ing and graceful in style, and marked by liberality and freedom of sentiment." 
— Albany Argus. 

" The glance which we have been enabled to take at the pages of this work, 
has impressed us very favorably, and we anticipate much pleasure in its peru- 
sal. The Rev. Dr. Hawes of this city came over from Liverpool in the same 
steamer with Mr. Mitchell, and in his preface to ' Religion of the East,' &c, 
he says, ' I remember with great satisfaction the many pleasant hours we 
spent during the voyage, in communicating to each other the views we have 
been led to entertain of the countries we had visited. I derived much useful 
information from our intercourse, and I take this opportunity to say, that he has 
gathered from his European tour, rich materials for a book of travels, which I 
am happy to learn may soon be expected from the press, and from what J know 
of his plan and his ability to execute it, I venture, before-hand, to promise the 
public that they may expect from his pen, not a mere itinerary, but a work 
highly instructive and useful.' " — Hartford Courant. 

"The author of these volumes is a New England clergyman, who, travelling 
for his health, has given us the result of his observations. His tour was pre- 
cisely the one which we would have marked out for ourselves ; and the ob- 
jects which attracted his attention, would have been sought for by ourselves ; 
hence we felt prepossessed in favor of his book, as soon as our eye had glanced 
over the table of contents. As to his qualifications as a writer of such a jour- 
nal, we regard them as very respectable. A sagacious observer, with right re- 
ligious principles, with not too much national prejudice to withhold justice from 
others, with good powers of description and an easy pen, he has embodied in 
his volumes many interesting facts and much just observation on the various 
topics which came under his consideration. The book is very readable and in- 
teresting as well as instructive, and we can therefore freely recommend it." — 
Presbyterian. 

"The book of travels in Europe, by Rev. J. Mitchell, late minister in Nor- 
thampton, is a valuable and interesting work, written in a lively manner, and 
containing much important discussion in comparing the state of society in Eu- 
rope with that in America.." — Courier. 



Kotcs from Over Sea. 

" The author is favorably known to many of our readers, as the former 
highly esteemed pastor of the Edwards Church in this town. Severe illness 
obliged him to dissolve his connection with his flock, and he sought a restora- 
tion to health in a voyage to, and tour throughout, Europe. Although he has 
not fully attained the end he had in view, yet he has in a very handsome 
manner atoned for the loss of his presence and society, by presenting his friends 
with two of the most interesting volumes we ever read. The author com- 
mences his 'Notes' as soon as he leaves New York, and ends them only 
v\ith his safe arrival at Boston. He landed when outward bound at Plymouth, 
proceeded to London, and from thence to Birmingham, and so on to Scotland and 
Ireland ; after which he passed over to Belgium, down the Rhine, through 
Germany and Switzerland, and embarking at Marseilles, proceeded to Naples, 
thence to Rome, Florence, Paris, and home by way of Liverpool. In such a 
lengthened tour over ground so rich in interest, there was abundant scope for 
observation, and Mr. Mitchell has made the most of it. What his eye saw, was 
necessarily revolved in his mind, and the work abounds in interesting reflec- 
tions, which form not the least valuable part of it. It abounds in sentiment, 
but there is no affectation of sentimentality : the author's reflections are sober, 
discriminative, judicious, moral, and religious. Being addressed to a brother, 
the style adopted by the author was naturally somewhat familiar, but we think 
its colloquial character makes the subject matter more agreeable. To his per- 
sonal friends, it undoubtedly will be so, and we imagine it will have a greate* 
charm with the general reader, than if the style had been elaborated and for- 
mal. There is much valvable, and, to us, novel information respecting the la- 
boring and agricultural population of England, and a proportionate amount of 
judicious reflection engrafted upon it. The remarks on the Church of England 
will be read with great interest by the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and 
other lovers of religious freedom who have adopted this as their chosen abode. 

" On all subjects connected with churches, or church government, religious 
liberty is contended for with the natural and honest ardor of one whose privi- 
lege it has been to enjoy it in its largest measure from his birth ; and that part 
of his book in which the author treats of the Scottish Kirk Secession will, we 
think, be read with very great interest by all haters of ecclesiastical tyranny, 
and more particularly by such as cherish New England feeling. 

" It is pleasant to perceive that Mr. Mitchell's tour has resulted in making him 
more and more attached to the land of his nativity. He says at the close of 
his second volume, ' I strained my eyes to see New England, as we passed 
along its eastern coast, and at the city of the Pilgrims, my heart leaped ashore 
sooner than my feet.' ' Nor after seeing the Old World, do I feel it to be 
among the smallest of my obligations to God, that he has given me my birth 
and home on this side of the water rather than on that.' 

" We heartily commend Mr. Mitchell's work to an extended perusal. It is 
vastly superior "to the generality of books of travel which tourists are in the 
habit of palming off on the public, and will make very entertaining and in- 
structive reading for the family circle." 

[The above, from trie Hampshire Gazette, is understood to be from the pen 
of an English gentleman.] 

'•The contents of these two handsome volumes, comprising the observations 
of a distinguished clergyman, during a protracted visit in the old world, will be 
-ead with avidity and lively interest. His observations, which extend to almost 
everything connected with the social and religious condition of England, 
Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, Germany, &c. ; their gov- 
ernments, agriculture scenery, manners, and customs — are replete with infor- 
mation of general interest to readers of every class."— Philadelphia Christian 
Observer. 

" It [the book] records his impressions of travel in England, Scotland, Ireland, 
and the continent ; and although its appearance is not attended with the usual 
preparatory nourish which seems indispensable in the publishing business 
now-a-days, we are inclined to think from a cursory perusal, that it is as judi- 
cious and sensible a book of travels as has been published for some time past." 
—Christian Intelligencer. 

" He has collected a vast amount of useful information, which he imparts 
With great good sense in an agreeable way." — Evening Post. 



A TREATISE ON 

INTERNATIONAL LAW, 

By Daniel Gardner, Esq., Counsellor at Law. 1 vol. 12mo. 
Lately published. 

From the many flattering testimonials of this work, the publishers select the 
following: 

Extract of a letter from the Hon. Alexander H. Everett to the author, giving 
his opinion of the International Law and American Polity. 

" I have read the work, somewhat hastily, but with great pleasure. It ex- 
hibits an extent of research and a liberality of sentiment which do you credit. 
The suggestion, which you render more particularly prominent, that of discon- 
tinuing the practice of plundering private property at sea in time of war, must, 
I think, be adopted at no great distance of time. This reform in the law of na- 
tions is imperiously demanded by a regard for consistency, if by no higher mo- 
tive, and cannot much longer be delayed. It is a sin and shame that the pre- 
sent barbarous system should be upheld by the authority of a single power 
against the universal sentiment of the civilized world — and that too" a power 
professing to act uniformly on the purest principles of morality and religion. 
Mankind will not tolerate again such barefaced inconsistency ; and if Great 
Britain should attempt in any future war to revive against neutrals a preten- 
sion which she put forward during the last, she will be met by another cru- 
sade, as general as that of the Armed Neutrality of the American Revolution, 
and, [ trust, still more effectual." 

In a second letter, Mr. Everett, 'speaking on the part of the book relating to the 
admission by Britain of neutral rights, and of the doctrine that free ships make 
free goods, says : 

"Although I am pretty familiar with this topic in all its parts, your account 
of the adhesion of Great Britain to the liberal code at and since the treaty of 
Utretcht, had on my mind in some degree, the effect of novelty." 

Professor Cogswell, late of the Theological Seminary, East Windsor, Conn., 
now of New Brunswick, N. J., referring to the work, says : 

" I have read it with much pleasure — while reading it the thought was sug- 
gested to my mind that it would be an excellent book for our schools and aca- 
demies. Indeed such a book is needed in every family in this free country. It 
ought to be read by every man, who gives his vote either for State or National 
officers. The articles are numerous, important, and easily understood. I can 
with much satisfaction recommend it to all employed in teaching the boys and 
young men of our country." 

James Dixon, Esq., Counsellor at Law, Hartford, Conn., writing his opinion 
of the book, says : 

" Permit me to say that in my humble judgment, its merit is of the highest 
order, and will greatly add to the already enviable reputation of its author." 

Wendell Phillips, Esq., of Boston, writes thus to the author in reference to 
the book : 

" Your main purpose — the skeleton of your whole system, I heartily concur 
in and sincerely applaud, bringing all points to the test of right and wrong. 
1 Where will the consequences of the American Revolution end V used to be a 
fr.vorite exclamation of John Adams. One now-a-days is tempted to ask like- 
wise — ' Where will the consequences of Paley's doctrine of expediency end V 
Thanks to you that in International Law you have thrown, I believe, the first 
stone at the head of the foul doctrine." 

Speaking of bringing all questions to the test of the Moral Law of God, he 
says : 

" This, I take it, is the vital essence of your philosophy of International Ju- 
risprudence, but I never saw it carried out into detail, and the illustrations 
which your work furnishes " 



Gardner's International Law. 



"The several facts of history are presented as distinct features, warm with 
life, to the mind, while the great lesson taught by them is given in words 
graven with deep thought. We commend the work to the consideration of 
every true American." — Protestant Churchman. 

" We earnestly commend the book to the regard of even* intelligent youth 
who wishes to know where he may find in a small compass the reading that 
shall instruct him on the great subject of national right, justice, and welfare." 
— Hartford paper. 

The work has been commended by the Journal of Commerce, New York Ob- 
server, and other leading journals at New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, 
Boston and Providence. 



THE ROMAN CHURCH, 

AND MODERN SOCIETY: 

From the French of M. Quinet. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by 
C. Edwards Lester, Esq. 



THE JESUITS: 



From the French of MM. Michelet and Quinet. Edited, with an Introduction 
and Notes, by C. Edwards Lester, Esq. 

DISCOURSES ON THE 

APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION: 

By W. D. SnodgrasSj D.D., Pastor of the Fifteenth-street Presbyterian Church, 
New York. 1 vol. l2mo. 

CONTENTS. 

The Doctrine stated. The Doctrine brought to its proper test. The Nature 
of Ordination. No traces of a Prelatical Bishop in the Jewish High Priest- 
hood, in Timothy, in Titus, nor in the Angel of the Seven Churches. Testi- 
mony of the Fathers. The Apostolic Succession brought to the test of History. 
The true Succession. 

RATIONAL MNEMONICS, 

OR ASSISTANCE FORTHE MEMORY, 

Resulting from a Philosophical direction of natural principles. By Thomas 
Hallworth. 1 vol. 12mo. 



THE EDUCATIONAL READER: 

BY S. S. RANDALL, ESQ. 

This work Is going rapidly into use: the attention of teachers is requested 
to it. 



ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY; 

FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND ACADEMIES. 

By Professor William W. Mather. Fifth Edition. In one volume. 18mo. 



EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE. 

"The object of the following pages is, to exhibit a concise sketch of Geo- 
logy, for the use of Academies and the higher classes in Primary Schools. It 
is desirable that the community should be familiar with the lending facts of 
this science, that they may be enabled to apply it to the various economical 
purposes of life. Every science is valuable to the community, in proportion 
as the knowledge of its facts and applications is disseminated among the mass 
of the people. As the number of observers increases, more facts will be accu- 
mulated, and the resources of the country developed. * * * * 

" This little work is a sketch of the author's public course of instruction in 
Geology ; during the progress of which, its principles are illustrated by refe- 
rences to American localities, and visiting those localities when practicable." 

Since the publication of this w r ork, Professor Mhther has been appointed to 
take a Geological Survey of the State of New York ; and his report on this 
subject, in one large quarto volume, is esteemed one of the most valuable con- 
tributions to this branch of scientific literature in this country. 



NORTH AMERICAN BOTANY: 

Comprising the naave and common cultivated Plants, north of Mexico. By the 
late Amos Eaton, A. M., and John Wright, M. D. 1 vol. 8vo. 



DEWEY'S PIKE'S ARITHMETIC— 8vo. 

"Pike's Arithmetic is too well known and too highly appreciated to require 
any recommendation ; and by furnishing an edition of that work, in which 
common language is substituted for algebraic signs, Professor Dewey has con- 
ferred a favor on those who may wish to acquire or teach Arithmetic without 
Algebra ; by whom it is presumed this edition will be patronized." — [President 
Nott of Union College. 



WICKHAM'S TIME-BOOKS, 

FOR MECHANICS' AND MANUFACTURERS' ACCOUNTS. 

" Its use, I am well convinced from having used a book of similar form in 
j*irt, will be the means of preventing many misunderstandings between em- 
ployers and employed, that often occur by means of the loose manner of keep- 
ing their accounts." 

EATON'S CHEMICAL INSTRUCTOR.— 
12mo. 



yCA T m*L^&^' (*^U /■/£*■' ^^ C'/l^^CsV'll>>>L< , LS OJ?-^ ^is-c c*^Ck-^ 



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ROMAN CHURCH 



AND 



MODERN SOCIETY. 



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF PROF. E. QTJINET, 
OF THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE t 



EDITED BY 

C. EDWARDS LESTER. 



V 




NEW YORK: 
GATES & STEDMAN, PUBLISHERS, 

114 William street, near John, 

AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS AND PERIODICAL 
AGENTS THROUGHOUT THE U.S. AND CANADA. 





Sust fJubltsfyjitr, bg 
GATES & STEDMAN, 

114 WILLIAM STREET (NEAR JOHN), NEW TORE, 




THAT HIGHLY INTERESTING WORK, 

THE JESUITS: 

FROM THE FRENCH OF MM. MICHELET AND QUINET, 
OF THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 

EDITED BY C. EDWARDS LESTER, ESQ. 



NOTES FROM OVER SEA 



CONSISTING OF 

OBSERVATIONS MADE IN EUROPE, 

BY REV. JOHN MITCHELL. 

f2 volumes, 12mo.] 



; THESE VOLUMES PRESENT TO THE MIND OF THE READER A 
TRUE PICTURE OF THE STATE OF SOCIETY, MORALS, RELIGION, 
ETC., IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ON THE CONTINENT. THE 
VIEW OF POPERY, AS IT IS AT HOME, AS PRESENTED IN 
THE CHAPTERS ON ROME AND NAPLES, WILL LEAD 
EVERY PHILANTHROPIST IN THIS LAND OF RE- 
LIGIOUS FREEDOM TO PRAY THAT IT MAY 
EVER REMAIN FREE FROM THE THRAL- 
DOM OF ROMANISM/' 





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